This is the type of advertising where your text ads are displayed with Google AdSense on participating websites. You will often see these ads on other web pages inside advertising boxes that look very similar to Google AdWords advertising boxes. There are several people who think contextual advertising is a big waste of time and money…I 100% completely disagree with this. Contextual advertising gives you a ton of traffic, which you can turn into large amounts of sales. I HIGHLY recommend Contextual Advertising. The way Content Advertising works is that Google looks through your entire keyword list and compares those keywords in your AdGroup to the words found in the text of all the sites that participate in Google AdSense. So basically Google is trying to perfectly match your advertisement to the appropriate web site. Once Google finds the right web sites to display your advertisement, you will begin to receive Content impressions and clicks. Common Mistake: Google Content Advertising only looks at broad matched keywords (they don’t use the keywords that are wrapped in “ ” or [ ] to help determine which site to advertise your campaign). What Really Happens: In my testing, Google Content Advertising looks at ALL of your Keywords. This includes broad keywords, phrase match keywords “”, and exact match keywords []. |  |
How Contextual Ads are Ranked
Google claims that the ranking position of your contextual advertisements is based solely on the Quality Score for that keyword on the Google Search.
You should also know that it is not possible to know when or where you ads will appear in Google’s Content Network. You can find out where they have appeared in the past by looking at the web log data for your website (this is only if you own your website), which will show where users visited your webpage from.
Google also only displays your ads on websites that match the theme of your high quality advertisements and keywords. Google will also stop displaying your advertisements if they begin to have poor results.
Luckily, Google also has a smart payment system, which insures that you don’t pay the full Max CPC on a website that will not bring you as many sales versus a website that brings in a lot of conversions.
Should You Have A Separate Campaign Just For Contextual Ad’s?
Some people like to make two separate campaigns, one just for Google Search Advertising and one just for Google Content Advertising. The only benefits of this is that it would give you more control over the pricing and wording for each keyword and text ad. If you decide to make two different campaigns you will notice that when you only have the Google Search Advertising selected for one campaign, that campaign will only show advertisements on Google.com. Whereas if you only have Content Advertising selected, your ads will be displayed on the participating AdSense websites and they will also be displayed on Google.com search engine. This could be a bad thing because Google will test and compete your Ad groups against each other if they contain the same keyword(s) Google will display the dominate advertisement (the one with the highest Quality Score).
| Advertising Preference | Content Network | Search Network |
| Only Content Advertising | Displayed | Displayed |
| Only Search Advertising | Displayed |
I have tested putting keywords into two different Campaigns (one campaign for Google Search keywords, and one campaign only for Google Contextual Keywords). And I would recommend keeping your content ads in the same campaign as your search ads. This will make it much easier to control and your Content Keywords will not be competing with your Search keywords.
Different Advertisements For Contextual Ads?
Some people may tell you that you should have different advertisements for your Contextual ads than your Google Search Ads. Their point being that when people are searching Google they are looking for information so they are scanning the whole page, whereas if they are on a website reading an article they are concentrating on the article and are ignoring the advertisements on the webpage.
You do not need to create two different advertisements for Contextual and Google Search. Google actually recommends that you don’t make two separate text advertisements. Your ad should do one thing and only one thing… it should make the webpage viewer want to click on it. In my testing I have found that an advertisement with a high CTR on the Google Search will usually also have a high CTR on the Google Content Network. Also, Google uses your keywords Quality Score in the Google Search to help aid in the ranking of that keyword in Contextual Advertising. In order for you to use the same text successfully for both the Google Search and the Google Content Network your keywords have to be targeted and related to your text Ad.
If You Think Contextual Advertisements is A Waste of Time & Money…
Then you may want to change your views on Contextual Advertising after I show you how to take advantage of it.
Above is a screenshot of the activity for one of my Ad Groups. As you can see my Content Ad’s are converting twice as well as my Search Network ads.
The Good things about Google Content Ads (Also called Contextual Ads).
- Content Ads CTR doesn’t affect the CTR of your Google Search Advertisements and it doesn’t affect the performance or ad ranking of your Google Search Ads. This means your content advertisements could have a Click Through Rate of 0.01% and it will not affect your Quality Score for the Google Search network.
- You get way more traffic.
The Bad things about Google Content Ads:
- You pay full bid price for each click (depending on the websites your ad is displayed on. Remember earlier I said Google will not charge you your full Max CPC on websites that are not expected to bring you a lot of conversions).
- You cannot see which keywords brought in the most clicks.
- You can get too much traffic costing you a lot of money.
Here’s the main thing with Contextual Advertising…you get a TON of traffic. This can be a very good thing if your Ad’s have a high CTR or it can be a very bad thing if your Ad’s have a poor CTR.
Here are the ways you can improve your contextual advertising:
- Find and add more specific keywords to your AdGroup, the more specific the better. For example if you are advertising for PDA’s use key phrases like “cheap Ipaq 6315”, “low cost Ipaq 6315”, “Ipaq 6315 sale”, etc. Don’t worry about finding every single key phrase possible, but try to generate a good keyword list. If you do this correctly then you can use Google’s Keyword Tool (I talked about this earlier) to its fullest potential.
- Do not just have one Text Advertisement per AdGroup. I would recommend having at least 3-4 text ads per Ad Group. Use the techniques mentioned earlier to write successful text advertisements, and once you get four Ad’s monitor their performance (don’t worry Google will display the performance information you need so you don’t need to write it down daily). After 2-3 days pass you will hopefully see one or two ads performing well (or better than the other ads), when this happens change your poorest performing text ad completely by giving it a new title, and description. Keep on doing this until your ads CTR’s meet your standards.
Managing Content Network Bids
We all know that the content network performs very differently from Google’s Search Network. Sometimes the content network will have higher conversion rates, and other times the content network will have lower conversion rates. Either way, you can do things to increase your profits.
The easiest and best way to do this is to enable separate bids for the content network. To do this, go into your Campaign Settings and click “Content Bids”.
Doing this will allow you to specify different bids for Google’s Content Network and Google’s Search Network. You will specify these bids in your AdGroups, not in your campaign.
If your Content Network is performing very well, then I would recommend lowering your bids 1-2 cents.
If you’re losing money through the Content Network, then I recommend you lower your bids by at least 3-5 cents to lower your advertising costs.
Image Ads
The Google Content Network allows you to display image ads instead of text advertisements. Image ads will only appear on contextual websites that allow image ads, so don’t expect to see membersite/sm appear on Google’s search network. I don’t recommend image ads for those of you who are new to internet marketing with Google AdWords.
There are rules that apply to image ads, but I recommend you watch the following video from Google about images ads to get a better idea:
Video Ads
The Google Content Network also allows you to advertise video ads on participating contextual websites. With video ads the user will usually have to click on the advertisement twice before they will go to your website. This is because the user’s first click will cause the video ad to play and then the user’s second click will take them to the website.
I recommend watching the following video by Google to learn more about image ads.
Mobile Ads
Since it’s becoming more and more common for people to have internet access on their cell phones, Google allows you to create Mobile Advertisements. Mobile Ads appear on the Google search results when people search Google.com using their cell phones. The advantage of using mobile text ads is that these ads will re-direct the web surfer to a mobile phone webpage or it will connect them to your business phone.
If you want to know more information about Mobile Ads, I recommend you watch the following video from Google.
Random Information on Contextual Advertising
Image advertisements (where a picture you choose is approved by Google and is displayed next to your text advertisement) will only appear on contextual advertising and they will only appear on the websites which accept it.
Your contextual advertisements will only be displayed in the countries or regions which you specified in your campaign settings earlier. This means if you have an advertisement in English, it will not appear on a website which is in a language other than English.
Site Targeted Advertising
I recommend watching this introduction video by Google on Site Targeted Advertising:
When you advertise using Site Targeted Advertising you write your Text Ads, Name your Campaigns and AdGroups, and view your performance exactly the same way as you do in Contextual Advertising. The biggest difference is that in site targeted advertising, you do not choose which keywords you want to use to advertise your website. Instead you choose which websites you want to advertise on. Other than this difference, site targeted advertising is set up the same way as Contextual Advertising is. This means that your advertisements will be displayed on other websites rather than the Google Search (although I have seen impressions in the Google Search network for some of my Site Targeted campaigns).
Creating a Site Targeted Campaign
I recommend watching this video by Google on creating a site targeted campaign for your AdWords account:
It may sound confusing at first, but its pretty straight foreword. You set up your campaign as you would normally, but instead of adding keywords Google will ask you to choose which websites you want to advertise on. Don’t worry if you don’t know specifically which websites you want to use. Google will ask you to make a small list of keywords which accurately describe your website, and from that list Google will display a list of websites which have similar content.
Once you see a website you want to advertise on, you can select that website and have Google show you even more websites which have similar content to that website.
You will notice that some of these sites will accept image ads, while others only allow text ads. Google will also display the amount of impressions you can get from each website (remember that Google’s estimated impressions, clicks, and cost are usually way off, usually too high, so don’t expect these to be completely accurate).
Once you select the websites you want to advertise on, you select your Maximum Bid. This bid is different from normal bids. Instead of paying per click, you pay for every 1,000 impressions. This is where you can see the term CPM (Cost Per Thousand). You can choose to pay more for a specific website, or you can have the same CPM for all of the websites you choose. The minimum you can bid for 1,000 impressions is $0.25, and the more you bid the higher your rank.
Benefits of Site Targeted Advertising
A few of the benefits are that you can select which website you want to advertise on. This is good if you see that one of your competitors has a higher ranking than you in AdWords, but also allows AdSense on their website. If this is the case then you can simply choose that website to advertise on, and compete for his customers on his own web site.
Technically, you can get 1,000 clicks for as little as $0.25, but don’t expect that. Site Targeted advertising is usually more expensive than pay per click advertising. This is because you usually get one to five people to click on your advertisement out of 1,000 impressions.
Disadvantages of Site Targeted Advertising
The bad things about site targeted advertising are that most of the time your advertisement doesn’t show on the more popular websites (the ones you actually want your advertisements displayed on) and it is usually more expensive, not to mention confusing selecting the appropriate websites to advertise on.
How to Get Clicks for Less than $0.01 Per Click
First off, let me just say that it is extremely difficult to get a lot of clicks for $0.01 per click. It is possible to get clicks for less than $0.01 per click, but it’s not very likely.
Obviously you can’t get less than $0.01 per click in Google’s Search, because Google will only allow the minimum bid to be $0.01. So…if the least amount of money you can bid on a single click is $0.01, how do you get your average cost per click lower than that?
Here’s what you have to do. You can’t do this in any regular campaign because it won’t work. So you have to create a new “Placement Targeted” campaign. Why placement targeted? Simple. In placement targeted advertising you have the option of paying per thousand impressions (CPM). Here’s the idea. If you bid something like $0.25 for every thousand impressions and 25 people click on your advertisement, you’ve paid $0.01 per click. If you pay $0.25 for 1,000 impressions and you get more than 25 clicks, you’ve just gotten traffic on Google for less than $0.01 per click!
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