eWhisper - 12:52 pm on Jun 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

Many advertisers received emails last night/ this morning with explanations how to turn on site target and enable it for their accounts.

For the vast majority of accounts I received these emails for, none of them had content target enabled. Most of the accounts which use content target did not receive an invite. It looks like Google is trying to bring new advertisers into the content network.

The setup process is very easy. When you create a new campaign, you choose if it's keyword or site target, upload at least one image, pick a display/destination URL, wait for Google to verify it all, and your done.

Note: it is images only - no text ads. The image sizes and terms are the same as image ads.

The next step is picking sites. The process is very easy. The first test I did went very smoothly. A few general topics, and Google picked very appropriate sites. So then, I picked a few keywords which I was hoping would bring up one of my publisher sites (which is pretty niche). However, no matter what I tried, I could not bring up the website. Google was not at all intuitive on this specific keyword.

However, when I manually added my publisher site to the list of sites, the system refreshed with a very nicely targeted list of sites that I could put my ad. While the keyword selection didn't work - the similar websites sure does.

Bidding was very easy, I just picked a CPM. Not sure in the future if Google will start suggesting CPMs for certain sites or how it'll be handled for multiple bidders.

Pick a daily budget, and your done.

Just to test Google's limits, I then picked a site to target which didn't have AdSense ads on it. It seems Google's using their search 'similar pages' feature and filtering it against publisher site with image ads enabled, as the suggestions are mostly targeted.

The next step is, of course, measuring conversions.
Should be a fun day of stat watching.

[edited by: eWhisper at 1:23 pm (utc) on June 14, 2005]