Helpful tips on our new content network tools

Over the last year, we've released a number of new tools, which all have the same goal of giving you more transparency and control when advertising on the Google content network. We've talked about the benefits that placement performance reports, CPC bidding for placement targeting, and category exclusion each offer individually to content network campaigns, but we haven't yet discussed how these tools can be used together to improve performance.

If your advertising goals focus on getting customers to perform a particular action on your site, you can effectively measure these statistics by using AdWords conversion tracking, Google Analytics, or ValueTrack. You can also follow our content network optimization tips by creating a separate content campaign, uploading ads specifically designed for the content network, and linking to landing pages that closely match the message in your ads.

In order to further improve your content network performance, you can use a combination of our tools to see detailed statistics about your content network campaigns and make changes accordingly.

• Placement performance reports and CPC bidding for placement targeting

After a campaign has accrued a significant number of clicks on the content network, you can run a placement performance report to see where your ads have appeared. We recommend that you focus on sites where your ads have received a statistically significant amount of traffic (about 50 clicks or more). For more suggestions on how to use placement performance reports, please see these best practices.

To increase traffic from sites that are performing well, consider creating a new placement-targeted campaign and selecting CPC bidding instead of CPM. This strategy allows you to bid more for high-performing sites without increasing your bids for the rest of your content network traffic in existing campaigns.

• Placement performance reports and category exclusion

If you run a placement performance report and notice URLs that have received a significant number of clicks, but are driving very few sales, you can first check these URLs to see if the low-performing pages you're appearing on are similar in any way.

You can then use the Site and Category Exclusion tool to see if any categories available for exclusion match the patterns you've seen across low-performing URLs. By viewing statistics for each category within the tool you can confirm that a category is performing poorly before you exclude it.

• Placement targeting and category exclusion

If you'd like to run a campaign focused on increasing awareness of your business, you can create a CPM-priced placement targeting campaign to reach your target audience. If your primary goal is to generate awareness or maximize impressions, you should consider selecting CPM instead of CPC pricing.

You can then exclude categories for your placement-targeted campaign if you know that pages matching a certain topic or page type don't fit your business objectives. This allows your ads to appear on the placements you've selected while avoiding pages classified in the categories you've excluded.

The above ideas are just a few of the ways you can use our new tools to improve your account's performance. If you're interested in a simpler way to meet cost/conversion goals for your content network campaigns, you can use our new Conversion Optimizer bidding feature for campaigns that meet our minimum requirements.

By experimenting with different strategies and focusing on the statistics in your account we hope that you continue to find new ways to advertise successfully on the content network in the future.

Posted by Heather, Inside AdWords crew