If you are an AdWords user who mainly uses the search network you can forget nearly everything you learned. The content network is a different beast.
Your not reaching people who are actively searching for something, you are showing up on websites – think billboards and magazine advertising. This is interruption marketing, so you need to stand out when writing your ads.
First, you must separate your content network from search. Never run a search network in the same campaign as the content network. This option is done at a campaign level as below. Keep Google search unchecked and choose “The Content Network.”
The next setting you choose is how you would like your ads to show over time. Just like when setting you your search campaigns choose “Rotate evenly” so you can have AdWords evenly show your ads overtime so you can split test 2 or more ads at a time and choose a winning ad. This will improve your click through rate (CTR) and will lower your cost.
You then need to set your daily budget. Watch this as you can get a LOT of traffic very quickly on the content network. Start your daily budget lower until you are confident your ads are converting until you ramp it up. I usually start around 10 to 15 dollars a day on a new campaign.
The next setting to choose is how evenly you would like your ads to be shown throughout the day. You can choose either accelerated or standard. Accelerated means your ads will be shown as quickly as possible until you reach your daily budget limit, and standard means your ads will be shown evenly throughout the day.
This is another place where I differ in setting up the Content campaign. In search I set this as accelerated to get quick stats and split testing data on my ads but when running Content campaigns I set this as standard to make sure the ads are run evenly over the full day.
The reason for this is if I chose accelerated and at the start of the day with my ads possibly showing on a low converting, high traffic (and thus high ad impressions) websites I may get a lot of clicks and no conversions which would falsely lead me into thinking my ads never worked.
Where if the ads are shown evenly throughout the day they will have a better chance of showing on more websites and getting a larger visitor reach. This will give them a better chance of reaching a wider audience. See the setting the in graphic below on how to set this.
Lastly, choose your country’s and language you would like your ads to show in.
You need themed keyword adgroups in your content campaign adgroups. This tells the Google bots what your adgroups are about. This is how it chooses relevant sites to show your ads on on the Internet. It is best to choose about 5-20 themed keywords per adgroup and use the broad match only option. Write your ads to try and get attention. Make your ads stand out to grab a readers eye.
After your ads are running for a while you now can choose to run a Placement report to see what websites your ads are running on. In the new interface (which is still in beta at the time of this writing), you can see the websites your ads are running on right in the AdWords interface.
This is where the real power is. You now can see where your websites are running and choose to either exclude the ones that are costing you money in “Site Exclusions” or add the ones that are converting to their own placement campaigns.
