I’ve found that a lot of people want Google AdWords, but they don’t have the time to properly manage them.  It takes a while to understand all the data they throw at you, and hiring someone to manage your campaign is prohibitively expensive for many budgets.  So, whenever I come across a super quick tip to help out with an AdWords campaign, I’ll make sure to post it.

The first one is easy: kill off your content network ads.  If you go into your campaign details in your AdWords management area, you’ll see a check box to enable or disable content network advertising.  Content network ads show up on other sites (not Google search) that have signed up for the program, and which Google thinks are relevant to your ad.  Disable them and save your changes.

Why disable content network ads?  You only pay per click, so even if people are less likely to click on content network ads than normal ads, a click is a click, right?  Not really: in most campaigns I’ve managed, I’ve found that content network clicks are worth considerably less than a search engine ad click.  The visitors spend less time on the site and are less likely to buy.

If you have more time to manage your campaign, you can set separate content network bids that are much lower than your search engine marketing bids, based on your statistics which will show you how valuable a content network visitor is to you.  (Every campaign is different, so your results will vary.)  Keep in mind, though, that Google enables content network advertising by default: meaning that lots of people are unknowingly overpaying for these low-quality ads.  This means that bargains in content network advertising are few and far between.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Web Dev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.