Google Blends Placement and Keyword Campaigns

[Discovery]

Get the sorted details here

We've made a change to AdWords: offering keywords and placements in the same campaign. This advanced content network option is now available in your account.

Instead of creating separate campaigns for keywords and placements, you can now include both in any campaign. All ad groups now have tabs for both keywords and placements, and the two can work together to target your ads on the content network.

This gets to the meat of it:

More bidding control. While running ads on the content network with contextual targeting, you can also add placements to bid more or less when your ad appears on those placements. For instance, you might run your across the content network with a default bid of US$0.50, but target www.example.com with a bid of US$1.00 whenever your ad appears there.

I have to dig in and understand this a bit more before I can give my thoughts on its benefits.

Discovery

[Discovery]

WOW - I just read through most of the content regarding using and adjusting to the new set up for placement and keyword matching for the Content network.

Hey I have a bright idea; before one changes all the rules of the road, how about a lesson or two before we have to drive?

Search selected + keywords in the ad group: Your ads can appear on user searches related to your keywords.

Search selected + no keywords in the ad group: Ads in this ad group won't appear on search. Keywords are needed to be matched to user searches. Learn more.

'Relevant pages across the entire network' selected + keywords in the ad group: Your ads can appear on content network pages matching your keywords. Learn more.

'Relevant pages across the entire network' selected + no keywords in the ad group: Ads in this ad group won't appear on the content network. Keywords are needed for your ads to be matched contextually on the content network. (If you have also selected placement targeting in this ad group, your ads can appear on any individual placements you selected.) Learn more.

'Relevant pages only on the placements I target' selected + keywords in the ad group: Ads can appear only on the placements you choose, and only if the content of those placements matches your keywords. If your chosen placements don't match your keywords, your ad won't show. Learn more.

'Relevant pages only on the placements I target' selected + no keywords in the ad group: Ads can appear on any of the placements you choose. Learn more.

Did you have lawyers write this stuff?

A ton of comments coming

Discovery

[shaneekirk]

Yes. I saw this yesterday, and thought, "hey, a head's up would have been nice." I got all excited and played with it.

I'm not liking it yet. I *thought* that this would fix the need for having the placement and keyword campaigns separately, but you still have to keep them separate -- If the point of the placement it to show your ads where they wouldn't contextually show up with the keyword campaign.

Ugh. It is definitely confusing. Not beginner material!

[abbottsys]

Yes, I saw this come live in my account a couple of days back and I finally got around to using it today. It's confusing, but I decided to take a simple approach...

I'm treating "Placements" as bits of the vast Content Network that Google now offers independent control over - if you want that.

Of course, I would also like them to offer independent control over other vast tracts of the Content Network, such as Parked Domains, Gmail, Social Networking Sites, Youtube, etc. etc.

But at least this bodes well. Google is finally starting to offer advertisers a glimpse into the mysterious world of the Content Network, and admitting this is important by doing mainstream integration of these features. Hopefully this is just the beginning

[shaneekirk]

You have some control over the parked domains etc, if you go to tools and see the site exclusions/categories.

[Baylow]

Personally i just like the ability to adjust bids on a placement level.

Bidding up on sites that perform well vs. Bidding randomly into the universe of unknown potential placements... Much better.

[Discovery]

The main concern I have with the new offering is that Google has struggled to provide accurate performance data from its placement partners.

Without this data you have to manage your campaigns in the dark, or from 20k feet up.

The data tends to either be simply wrong, or only available at the campaign summary level but not down to the adgroup or individual placement level.

Our accounts still show large discrepancies between summary and adgroup performance data. So I know that the issue still exists.

As an example I have one campaign with over 23 million impressions and nearly 5k clicks. At the adgroup level, there are less than a few thousand impressions and hundreds of clicks.
At the placement level there is virtually no data.

One campaign per placement is not a great solution.

If and when this issue is resolved I will be more aggressive with the placement/keyword strategy.

Discovery

[Discovery]

So I read through my initial post and realized I came off more ticked than I truly was. My main concern is lead time. My vertical is a heated battle and I have formidable competition. If a new feature that can significantly impact performance is implemented then I need to have a strategy ready and beat or stay even with my competition. So, the no notice launch gets my feathers ruffled a tad.

I have now dug in and implemented what I believe to be a very keen strategy. I can only assume everyone else has gone and done something very similar. I cant go into detail as it is NDA, but in short it severely restricts our ad distribution to key placements sites / categories and locations within a site.

A couple notes for others using AE to make huge changes. When I read the FAQ it vaguely talks about being able to target not only sections but individual pages with the new system. I took this to mean that I could possibly target a specific page by entering it in as the placement location. In Adwords Editor, this is possible. No error comes up if you add multiple placements that include URLS that go beyond one directory level down. However once you attempt to post, then you get the errors.

So you still have to keep it to a single level directory. This is unfortunate as a great deal of websites use a convention of naming directories with at least 3 tiers.
website.com/consumer/
consumer/debt
consumer/loans
consumer/housing
consumer/debt/articles/greatarticletotarget.html

In this case we cant target the page we want instead we have to rely on the combination of keywords and placement at the website.com/consumer/ level

The good news is that with the right approach advertisers can now effectively turn off content and go with content/placement/keywords and not have to worry about new junk sites coming in. We can research, define and lock in to a specific group of publishers and control the bids for them individually.

There are more questions to be answered which I will follow up with later.

Discovery

[rensquared]

Is this discovery the same as the keyword discovery?

[Discovery]

No, I'm not associated with any product or service regarding keyword discovery.

I liked the name because in search everything is about the act of discovery. Really, what makes the net fun and exciting IS the adventure of discovery.

For similar reasons my company's name is Lead Discovery

[rensquared]

Originally Posted by Discovery

No, I'm not associated with any product or service regarding keyword discovery.

I liked the name because in search everything is about the act of discovery. Really, what makes the net fun and exciting IS the adventure of discovery.

For similar reasons my company's name is Lead Discovery

Oh okay, so this Discovery thing, does it generate new keywords that are related to a certain domain?

[Discovery]

Keyword Discovery is an important part of SEM and SEO. It is as the name suggests; the process of discovering keywords, for endless reasons - bad keywords to negative out from campaigns, good keywords to optimize for, long tail keywords you may have missed in your lists. Keyword discovery is a continous process and one of the most important to SEM's.

It only makes sense that there are a number of products and services that make use of the phrase Keyword Discovery".

The smart lads over at Trellian have a software product called "Keyword Discovery" and they own the domain name as well. This product does some of the heavey lifting in searching and finding keywords for you. Other similar products are wordtracker, adgooroo. If you want a robust and free keyword tool then heck try the free ones at Google, Yahoo and Adcenter!

Discovery

[rensquared]

Originally Posted by Discovery

Keyword Discovery is an important part of SEM and SEO. It is as the name suggests; the process of discovering keywords, for endless reasons - bad keywords to negative out from campaigns, good keywords to optimize for, long tail keywords you may have missed in your lists. Keyword discovery is a continous process and one of the most important to SEM's.

It only makes sense that there are a number of products and services that make use of the phrase Keyword Discovery".

The smart lads over at Trellian have a software product called "Keyword Discovery" and they own the domain name as well. This product does some of the heavey lifting in searching and finding keywords for you. Other similar products are wordtracker, adgooroo. If you want a robust and free keyword tool then heck try the free ones at Google, Yahoo and Adcenter!

Discovery

So from keyword discovery, SEO/SEM can easily detect the negative keywords???

[Discovery]

Absolutely, often while trying to expand keyword terms you find unexpected high volume keywords that you would want to negative out.

I may be researching how to expand "chapter 7 bankruptcy" services and find out that there is a high search volume for "chapter 7 Montana" because that is the same chapter in which Hannah Montana discloses her new boyfriend in her Disneyaugraphy - Negative out "Hannah" Montana - Who knew she would be related to a bankruptcy related campaign? Toss in "Miley" while you're at it just in case.


Discovery

[rensquared]

Originally Posted by Discovery

Absolutely, often while trying to expand keyword terms you find unexpected high volume keywords that you would want to negative out.

I may be researching how to expand "chapter 7 bankruptcy" services and find out that there is a high search volume for "chapter 7 Montana" because that is the same chapter in which Hannah Montana discloses her new boyfriend in her Disneyaugraphy - Negative out "Hannah" Montana - Who knew she would be related to a bankruptcy related campaign? Toss in "Miley" while you're at it just in case.


Discovery

Hmm, how do you identify which is the negative keyword? All I know so far that the negative keywords are (Nude, girls, free, sex, porn).

[danika]

So far we're getting good results with placement bids. In the past I've always thought content match was not a good deal and used site match instead. But since our products have a narrow market, site match on sites like YouTube and MySpace doesn't work. But now we're able to do placements on those two sites to the right target audience.

We did have to set up separate ad groups with different keywords though. Example: We produce training videos for various software products. In our search ads we have keywords for training for ABC software like 'ABC training' and 'ABC tutorial' but NOT 'ABC'. If we did, we'd be bidding against the online sellers of the software, and when we do that our click-through rates are pretty low. However, especially on YouTube and to a lesser extent on MySpace, our assumption is that people are mainly looking for training, so we set up a different ad group for placements only and added 'ABC' to the keywords. We're still bidding against the online sellers of the software, but our click-through rates are a lot higher.

[rensquared]

Wow, good job!! COngratulations sir..

[searchengineman]

Originally Posted by danika

So far we're getting good results with placement bids. In the past I've always thought content match was not a good deal and used site match instead. But since our products have a narrow market, site match on sites like YouTube and MySpace doesn't work. But now we're able to do placements on those two sites to the right target audience.

We did have to set up separate ad groups with different keywords though. Example: We produce training videos for various software products. In our search ads we have keywords for training for ABC software like 'ABC training' and 'ABC tutorial' but NOT 'ABC'. If we did, we'd be bidding against the online sellers of the software, and when we do that our click-through rates are pretty low. However, especially on YouTube and to a lesser extent on MySpace, our assumption is that people are mainly looking for training, so we set up a different ad group for placements only and added 'ABC' to the keywords. We're still bidding against the online sellers of the software, but our click-through rates are a lot higher.

Sound like you're using negative-exact match.

if ABC is not what you need.

ABC - Set on Broad

Negative Keyword Exact.
-[ABC]

You get every combination containing ABC - Benefit of Broad, without the Core Keyword "ABC" which will not be buyers. I assume you are constantly looking at your logs and accounts to find more keyword opportunities. Negative Exact match is the best way to accomplish this without being slaughtered on Broad.

Searchengineman