Google lifted one of the many veils that obscures the inner workings of its paid advertising program last week by unmasking its Content Network distribution sites to advertisers. These are the sites that keyword-targeted Adwords ads appear on when you opt-in to Google’s Content Network on a PPC basis.For the first time ever, the launch of the new Google Placement Performance Report affords AdWords advertisers who are running keyword-targeted campaigns a bird’s eye view of their networked media buy. The purpose of the report is to check ad position in AdWords page units on the various Websites where they are running. What is far more revealing to this search marketer, however, is the eye opening (and jaw-dropping) view of the actual sites where content ads appear, especially the realization that the quality of those Content network sites can be very poor. (In contrast, Google “site-targeted” campaigns place ads on Websites that are selectable in advance and on a CPM-basis).
A look at the sites being offered up for a mainstream B2C advertising campaign (by mainstream, I mean a campaign of fairly general terms and devoid of highly specialized keywords), reveals a substantial number (more than 15%) of proxy sites and anonymous surfing sites (neither of which are auditable), sites that were wholly irrelevant to the subject matter, such as s Song Lyrics sites or phonebooth finders, and sites using alphabets other than the language specified (which in this case was English). I’ll eat my hat if click fraud is not in play at these sites, which rang up clickthroughs at an alarming rate while yielding less than one conversion on a $3,000 run with over 14,000 keywords.
Seeing is disbelieving. When choosing Google Content’s Network for keyword-targeted advertising, the implication (at first impression) is all too clear. Use ONLY highly specialized terms that are completely unambiguous in terms of Content Network placement, OR be prepared to spend days or weeks adding negative keywords and site exclusions to your campaigns based on the feedback. One can only hope that Google will take seriously the concerns of advertisers who seek credit for erroneous or unauditable ad placements, and that is anything but clear.
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