My impression (pardon the pun) is that search results work better because folks are actually loooking for something specific, and ads are geared to that.
By contrast, they are less likely to click on Google Content Ads (Adsense), off websites because that takes them off the site that they wanted to be on, to somewhere not always relevant to their inquiry (AdSense is an imperfect matching system, at best). Then again, what do I know?
[webmasterworld.com...]
Which has been discussed briefly here in the AdWords forum at:
[webmasterworld.com...]
The study showed that more than half of all Internet purchases are preceded by research in a search engine (75% in the case of travel). Also, most buyers complete their research at least two weeks before they buy. (In the travel sector, less than a quarter of buyers make a purchase during a research session.)
What this means is that, if you limit your ads to search, you may be missing out on the majority of people who research products or services before they commit to a purchase decision. Ads on content sites give you a chance to capture those prospects during the research cycle, at the critical moment when their mindset changes from "I'm looking for information" to "I'm ready to buy."
I have since removed it from content impressions, and I'm going to monitor how things go by just having it appear as search impressions.
I just went through my logs this morning and found that I had some PPC traffic from "parked" domains. I was almost ready to pull my ads from content when I noticed that it was very few clicks from those "parked" domains and the people did spend some time on my site browsing and looking around.
I also noticed that my ads were appearing on very well targeted and well designed sites. Although it costs me to get possibly untargeted traffic, the expense just doesn't justify pulling my ads at this time.
Give it a chance, you may be suprised by what content ads can do for you.
Another reason to remove the Content impressions is that I recently received an email from an irate surfer who was appalled at some article about the Pope, and was emailing all the google advertisers. Unbeknownst to me, I was one of them. I had never heard of the publication or its website, and my ad appearing there was only remotely connected in the most general way (a big flaw with Ad Sense in my view). I took the opportunity to straighten the person out on how Ad Words and Ad Sense works (the funny thing is, he was inadvertantly giving money to the site owners he despised, by clicking on all the AdSense ads). But it got me thinking...why waste impressions and precious click-thrus on people that are either not serious or are clicking for the wrong reasons?
I've found the only way to get a lot of traffic is to enable content, search may be more targetted, but there aren't a lot of clicks to be had there for me.
But my original question was: If I take my ad off Content impressions, will it appear more frequently in Search impressions, and vice versa?
The answer to this question really revolves around daily budget, punditman.
If the daily budget for a campaign is not sufficient to show one's ads 24/7, then yes, turning off the content network will cause the ads to show more on the search network. But only because the available budget is not being used for content as well, so more is available for search.
On the other hand if the daily budget is sufficient to show one's ads 24/7 for both networks, then turning off content will probably not result in increased traffic on the search network, all other things remaining the same.
AWA
