PPC Without Pity

All good search engine marketers know that pay per click advertising campaigns and search engine optimization efforts work well alone, but are really awesome when they’re integrated. PPC data can often be used for great keyword research, and analysis of SEO trends can help influence the structure of your PPC campaigns. Here’s a neat little trick I’ve found to streamline your linkbuilding research by using data from PPC content network campaigns.

First, you’ll need to run a simple content network campaign (if you haven’t already), and let it run for a little while to gather data. A couple of months should do. After you’ve driven a bit of traffic through content placements, run a content network placement report in Google, Yahoo, or MSN. You should get a big, long list of websites where your content ads showed up.

Your ads showed up on these sites because the search engines determined that they were relevant to your keywords and/or business objectives. Guess what? These are exactly the kind of sites you want backlinks from! You can sift through this list of sites and see which of them might be open to posting a link or doing a link exchange. Just let the search engines do the research for you – you’ve got enough to worry about with the tedious process of actually building the links.

The Google Content Network is one of my favorite ways to eke out a few more conversions in a flagging PPC campaign. However, it takes a lot of hard work and careful pruning away of unqualified traffic to make it work. Before you venture in to the exciting world of content network campaign mangagement, you should read up on how to review a placement report of your Google Content Network campaign.

After a little analysis, you should be able to figure out where junk traffic is coming from in your individual campaigns. However, there are a few repeat offenders that always seem to offer poor performance whenever they are included in a content network campaign:

1. Gmail – Sure, we all love Gmail. But as a marketer, I’m extremely wary of its performance on the content network. It drives a ton of impressions, but offers few clicks and even fewer conversions. I’m also willing to bet that most of the clicks it drives are from accidental clicks anyway. Most people are probably going to be preoccupied with whatever issue is in their email, and won’t be likely to click away. It’s just too distracting. Think of it this way: when was the last time you clicked on an ad or bought a product while you were checking your Gmail?
2. MySpace – Oh, MySpace. How far you have fallen. All joking aside, MySpace is surely one of the top drivers of impressions on the Google content network thanks to their lucrative ad deal with Google. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily translate into good results for marketers. Sure, MySpace has lots and lots of visitors, but they’re too preoccupied with being social or pimping their profile to really pay attention to ads. What’s worse is that MySpace’s demographics skew pretty young, around the late teens and early 20s. No offense to all you youngs out there, but teenagers sure love to click on ads and not spend any money. This means they’re spending your money (in the form of clicks) and not offering any return. Exclude this site on all content network campaigns, unless you happen to be marketing a product specifically for teens.
3. Error Pages/Parked Domains – This one covers a lot of ground, but fortunately Google makes it pretty easy to block them all in one fell swoop. On your campaign screen for your content network campaign, choose the “Networks” tab. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and expand the “Exclusions” option. Under the “Campaign level” section, click on “Add Exclusions” and select “Exclude category.” On the next menu, you’ll be able to select both Error Pages and Parked Domains for exclusion from ad distribution. The reason that you’ll want to exclude these pages is that people will be wanting to leave these pages as quickly as possible, since they have little content of value. Sometimes instead of hitting the back button, a user will click on a semi-relevant ad to get to a page they think might help them. This leads to few impressions of your ads (because the page sucks and no rational person would seek it out intentionally), but a high percentage of clicks (that usually don’t convert).

When starting your very own content network campaign, it’s a best practice to exclude at least these three sites. Once you gather more data and regularly exclude poor-performing sites, you can be on your way to content network cost-per-conversion bliss.

I’m a big fan of the Google content network. Most PPC marketers tend to avoid it, but with the proper diligence you can get some really great cost per conversion numbers and increase your total conversions. The content network is not for the lazy, though – in order to be successful, you need to know how to block traffic from website placements that drive expensive, non-converting traffic your way.

Fortunately, Google makes it easy to determine performance on the placement level. In fact, they have a special report just for this purpose. To run a content network placement performance report, just follow these steps:

1. Log in to your AdWords account, and go to the “Reporting” tab.
2. Under “Report Type,” choose “Placement Performance.”
3. Under “Settings,” choose the level of detail and the time frame you want to look at. You can choose whether you want to look at each individual web page that shows your ads (URL) or just how well your ads perform on an entire domain (Domain). Since content network traffic is usually pretty sparse, 30 days is probably the bare minimum of time you want to look at in order to get significant data.
4. Under “Advanced Settings,” open up “Add or Remove Columns” and make sure that your check boxes for conversions and cost-per-conversion are checked. These are the most important stats you’ll want to be looking at (as usual).
5. Pick a catchy name, click “Create Report,” and you’re done!

When analyzing this report, pay special attention to your cost metrics. If you see an unacceptably high CPA for a specific URL or domain, you can always add this to your negatives on the campaign level. That way, junk traffic from the site won’t drive up your total costs without providing additional conversions. If you run a placement performance report regularly, you can snuff out a lot of waste in your content network campaigns and start seeing some really great results from your targeted content network traffic.