We have been using Googles site exclusion feature and much to our pleasure have significantly decreased our costs and maintained, even increased our conversions in most campaigns. Kudos to google for implementing this feature.

Here is an interesting situation I would like your input on.
myway.com is a very content rich portal. Some of the sub domains/content areas do not work well for us and we exclude them. Others that are news related are more tricky. For example for weeks on end we may get poor results from apnews.myway.com, then they post an article on a topic related to our service and wham, great results. Have any of you developed strategies to monitor articles on sites like this in order to toggle your ads off and on?

Perhaps a news service would be of value here?

PS: Urchin has been a great asset helping us identify underperforming referring websites. If you are not currently using an analysis tool as robust as this I suggest you give it a trial. Another great add on from Google - When will Overture figure it out?

Cheers,

Discovery

We have been using Googles site exclusion feature and much to our pleasure have significantly decreased our costs and maintained, even increased our conversions in most campaigns. Kudos to google for implementing this feature.

Here is an interesting situation I would like your input on.
myway.com is a very content rich portal. Some of the sub domains/content areas do not work well for us and we exclude them. Others that are news related are more tricky. For example for weeks on end we may get poor results from apnews.myway.com, then they post an article on a topic related to our service and wham, great results. Have any of you developed strategies to monitor articles on sites like this in order to toggle your ads off and on?

Perhaps a news service would be of value here?

PS: Urchin has been a great asset helping us identify underperforming referring websites. If you are not currently using an analysis tool as robust as this I suggest you give it a trial. Another great add on from Google - When will Overture figure it out?

Cheers,

Discovery
presumably if it is an AP article then it is also sending you bursts of traffic from other channels right? in that case you can perhaps set up really specific content targeted ads which aim to phrase match the titles of the relevant articles that are getting syndicated about

as far as the Urchin thing goes many merchants do not like the idea of giving their ad broker full access to their data and value. in some cases (like with shopping.com) it has caused artificial increases in bid prices
http://www.traffick.com/2005/02/whats-click-worth-to-you-maybe-you.asp

I can't believe my synical mind didn't think of such a scenario. Although we don't use Urchin to track data sensitive ecommerce transactions, any data they collect from us may present a real concern over the long term. We will keep a sharp eye. For now it has saved us a bundle of time and money on google, as well as given us leverage to point out and fight for fraud refunds on Overture.

I have found a few PR clipping services that we are going to use to quickly compile the latest headlines in our clients industries and tie ads to their titles.

Thanks for your input!

Discovery

I can't believe my synical mind didn't think of such a scenario. Although we don't use Urchin to track data sensitive ecommerce transactions, any data they collect from us may present a real concern over the long term. We will keep a sharp eye. For now it has saved us a bundle of time and money on google, as well as given us leverage to point out and fight for fraud refunds on Overture.

I have found a few PR clipping services that we are going to use to quickly compile the latest headlines in our clients industries and tie ads to their titles.

Thanks for your input!

Discovery
The clipping service is a clever adaption.
The tracking programs once they reach a certain level are very similiar so a non-search engine owned option is not too hard to find (I have a personal prefernce for WebSideStory and KeywordMax)... we use two as well as NetTracker to play with the log files.