Google Adwords - Content Network

I know. a lot of people will tell you not to use content network. Well, at least if you are a beginner, you are suggested not to use content network.

But do you know that you can get quality clicks for much much lower costs, say 15%-20% lesser than the search network? Yes, you can.

Content network can be used effectively. You just have to follow a few guidelines. The guidelines that I have put here are from my experiences and feel free to share your views.

First and foremost, make sure your campaign is running only on search network for couple of weeks and measure the performance of your campaign on the search network. The gurus say, any CTR% that is 3% or more is good. I have posted detailed notes on these in my earlier posts. By now, you have also enabled the conversion optimizer in your Adwords, I suppose.

Here is what you will need to do. When you opt for your ads to be shown on content network, don't let your ads get displayed on all the sites in the content network. Make sure you choose the sites that are close to the niche that you are promoting your ad. For example, if you are promoting some diet programs, there is no meaning in displaying your ads in sites related to stock markets. That is what gives you wasted impressions, clicks and of course money!

One more advantage with content networks is that you can display banner ads on the content network on many of the sites. Banner ads are still quite effective. Google comes with many ready to use templates in various sizes (to be precise, about 6 sizes). Create few ads using the banner templates and run your ads on select sites on the content network.

Lo, you will get quality clicks at a low cost!

Happy Promoting and Making Money Online!

All the best!

Srinath

Google Banning Adwords Advertisers - Targeting Affiliate Marketers!!!!

Here is something I found which should be a not so pleasant shock to many of the internet affiliate marketers! The big boss of search engines has been doing something or the other, especially last 4-5 months which is making life difficult for affiliate marketers. Read on........

 

December 4, 2009

Google Begins Banning AdWords Advertisers Again: December '09 Big Ban

As you know, Google promised to ban AdWords advertisers at a higher rate and began doing so in late September and throughout November but promised to really step it up later last month.
I spotted a new thread at Google AdWords Help which has what appears to be dozens of advertisers who started getting banned yesterday, December 3rd, at the stroke of midnight. So when it turned into December 3rd, it seems like a bunch of automatic bans just went out and impacted tons of advertisers. There are also ongoing discussion about these bans at WebmasterWorld.
So it looks like a new Google strike on AdWords advertisers has come down.
Here is a copy of a ban email from Google these days:

Dear advertiser, We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality. As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future. Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.
As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks. If we find that an advertiser has submitted a landing page that egregiously violates our policies, we reserve the right to take immediate account-level action.
Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted. Further, advertising certain types of sites will lead to immediate account disabling. These types of sites include, but are not limited to:
* Sites that charge users or collect personal information in exchange for a product that is never delivered
* Sites that charge for "free" software
* Sites that trick users into paying for fake or poor-quality content
* Sites that charge users for information that makes unrealistic promises of financial or personal gain
* Sites that install malware software on a visitor's computer

Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account. In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted a least one site that egregiously violated our advertising policies. Although you may have removed these sites since our latest review, advertisers that have a history of promoting these types of sites are still subject to account-level disabling.
You can review our Advertising Policies, including our Landing Page and Site Quality guidelines, by visiting: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs
You may also review the complete AdWords Terms & Conditions here: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder
In addition, our FAQ about Account Disablings can be found here: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786
If you have additional questions or concerns not addressed by our policies or help center, you can contact support by replying to this email.
Sincerely,
The Google AdWords team

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help & WebmasterWorld.


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Quick Start Guide to Google Adwords For Newbies

One of the problems for any newbies is trying out Google Adwords is they spend more than they earn. It is also easy to get a Google SLAP if you don't do it irght. What I am giving here are very simple steps to start with Google Adwords. Shall discuss the Google Slap in a subsequent post.

Here goes!

1. Make sure you have a good landing page
2. Signup with Adwords
3. Do not create any campaigns in Adwords
4. Download Adwords editor
5. Create a campaign, adgroup and ad
6. Get google to Scan your site and suggest keywords
7. If google is suggesting some real stupid keywords, your landing page is not relevant, rewrite/correct it.
8. Check all the keywords and discard what you don't deem fit
9. use the keyword grouper option within adwords editor
10. It will group your keywords into multiple adgroups
11 check/review each of the adgroup and its keywords, discard those you don't want.
12. Verify all the details once carefully
13. Make sure that none of the adgroups has more than 15-20 keywords
14. If any adgroup has more than 15+ keywords better create a new adgroup and put them under that adgroup
15. Upload your ad to Adwords
16. Let the adwords team review your campaign (give 30 minutes to an hour)
17. Check the quality score of your keywords
18. Any keyword less than 5/10, delete the keyword
19. Run the campaign
20. Google will display ads from better performing adgroups and your costs will go down while increasing CTR and Quality scores gradually
21. Keep reviewing and keep removing keywords with Quality score less than 5/10
22. I will write about the campaign optimizer and opportunities features in the detailed guide.

This should help you kick start!

These are the tools that should help you out.

1. Keyword tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool
2. Traffic Estimator - https://adwords.google.com/select/Traff … torSandbox
3. Search Based Keyword Tool (results based on actual searches) - http://www.google.com/sktool/#
4. Insights for Search - http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Your cost per click (CPC) also depends on various factors.
1. The history of your campaigns. If you have had a bad start, history will be cruel to you.
2. Competition
3. Geographies that you are targeting

You can't help that there is so much competition for some of the keywords, especially keywords related to people searches, make money online, weight loss programs.....

There are contrasting views of highly competitive keywords, one school  saying don't bid for them and at the same time there is another school that says, if there is competition, then people are making money!

Focus on increasing your Quality Score and Click Through Rate. Over a period of time, the most competitive keyword will cost less as your ad position goes up into the top.

With usage of all these tools and techniques, it takes about a week to a fortnight for your campaign to be optimized. During these 1-2 weeks, you need to regularly review and keep making adjustments to your keywords, ads (don't touch the bids yet) to improve on the CTR and Quality Score.

Use the conversion tracker. Build a history of data for at least 2 weeks. That will give an indication of which adgroups are performing better. Then, you can discard/pause those adgroups.

Do let me know if you have found this information useful. Thanks for visiting my blog.

All the best!