By David Szetela
It’s a little-known fact there are important differences between content and search advertising on pay-per-click (PPC) networks like Google AdWords. Content advertising reveals ads on specialty websites. Search advertising shows ads in response to a user-entered search term. Understanding these distinctions are important.
The methods and best practices for controlling and optimizing content ad campaigns are very different than those required to get the most out of search advertising. Misunderstanding these differences is often the main reason that advertisers get such bad results from content PPC campaigns–in terms of click-through-rates, conversion rates and cost.
I’ll illustrate these differences by showing an example B2B content campaign ad group involving a fictitious company. Assume it sells software for business process re-engineering, aimed at medium- to large-sized businesses.
Ad Copy: In content advertising, the ad text needs to distract the site visitor’s attention from the publisher site’s content, which we’ve done in the ad below by highlighting a business manager’s fear–that they’re losing money without knowing it. The ad offers an easy way to quell the fear–download a white paper. Here’s the ad:
Are You Losing Millions?
Find Out in “Top Ten Business Process Mistakes.” F-r-e-e Download!
Keyword Set: In content campaigns, you’re not bidding on individual keywords; the keywords work in aggregate (and in combination with the ad group’s ad text) to direct the content matching algorithms to place ads on appropriate/relevant sites. The fact is, the keywords in a content ad group should be about the sites where you want your ad to appear, not (as much) about your product/service.
This may be a difficult concept to grasp, especially by experienced search advertisers. In search PPC campaigns, the advertiser tries to anticipate (and bid on) all of the search terms that might be used by someone seeking their product/service. In content advertising, the keywords should work to define the kinds of sites and pages where the ads should appear.
So in search advertising, this keyword list would be appropriate for an ad campaign attempting to attract sales leads for business process reengineering software:
* BPR
* BPR software
* Business process software
* Business process reengineering software
* Business workflow
* Business workflow software
* Business process improvement
While that may be a pretty good list to anticipate search terms used by potential customers, it’s a very bad list for content advertising, since it doesn’t act to identify site pages where ads should appear.
The content algorithms try to match your ad group’s “theme” to a finite, known list of themes or categories. You can download the list Google uses from here.
The Google theme list shows several possible themes for our ads, but one in particular, Business, includes a sub-theme Management & Corporate Operations, which has a sub-sub theme called Business Process. So a likely keyword list is:
* Business
* Management
* Operations
* Process
* Processes
* Workflow
* -small business
* -office
* -events
* -training
This list will ensure ads show up on pages that are read by corporate managers interested in Operations, Process and Workflow. Equally important, we’ve used negative keywords to try to keep ads off pages whose content is related to small business and less-strategic topics like events and training.
To learn more, be sure to check out David’s regular column on ClickZ.
