Why Your PPC Ads Don’t Work in the Content Networks
By Anna Johnson on April 4th, 2009An article by David Szetela is instructive for explaining why Internet marketers can achieve good results when running pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns on the search engine results pages (SERPs)… but terrible results when running those ads on the various content networks.
Quick background: when you devise a PPC campaign with one of the major search engines, e.g. Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, you get the option to not just run your ads alongside the search results, but also on the websites within the search engines’ respective ‘content networks.’
The content networks are the networks of websites that display ads from the Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher or Microsoft pubCenter programs (currently in beta) respectively.
It sounds good in theory: run your ads on sites that are targeted to the same audience. After all, the search engines will only display your ads on sites that are relevant, right? Right?
Not necessarily, and David Szetela points out that the problem begins when marketers attempt to apply their PPC ad campaigns to both the search and content networks.
In reality, optimizing content network based PPC ad campaigns and optimizing search based PPC ad campaigns are two different things.
This is largely based on the fact that search engines and content websites are two very different mediums, which, in turn, lend themselves to different performance criteria for advertising.
Without repeating David’s entire explanation, content ads tend to ‘underperform’ search ads because:
- They are ancillary and appear as distractions on a website (as opposed to being directly generated from a search engine user’s search); and
- Content ads are not as well matched to the websites displaying them as they are to people’s search phrases.
This being the case, the best thing you can do to optimize your search AND content PPC ad campaigns is to… separate them. That’s right, you want to create two entirely different campaigns, so you can focus on each kind of campaign on its own merits.
By default, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will invite you to combine the campaigns together – by virtue of inviting you to switch on/off content advertising. But you will be better off using one campaign for search, and one campaign for content, so you can improve the performance of each, instead of compromising one by improving the other.
Source: David Szetela, “Content Advertising Explained,” Search Engine Watch, November 5, 2007
