I'm assuming the content ads will appear on Gmail, so I logged into my gmail account and sent myself a message with a couple of normal English sentences that contained almost all my keywords, but none of my negative keywords.
I only see ads from my competition! I assume that because I'm only bidding $0.05, that I won't be the top ad, but even when I click on gmail's "more sponsored links>>", I see 12 ads. 2 are competitors, 1 sells our OEM product, 6 are for related items in our industry, and 3 are for something totally different that has a similar name.
You might ask if my ad is approved for content matching at all, but today I had 669 content impressions, CTR 0.4%. The last 7 days shows 4,361 content impressions, CTR 0.5%.
Why isn't our ad on Gmail? Is there some gmail magic I have to do?
Mack.
First of all it can take up to 5 or 6 days to get a content program up and running. Just be patient.
Once it is up check your ad copy to be sure that the ad identifies exactly what it is you are selling.
If it a service or product specific to one area be sure that the area name is in the ad to prevent misunderstood clicks.
Content is NOT like search. Your ads can show up on many different web sites. If you are, say, a scuba school in Seatle make sure that the area name is in the ad.
As an AdSense publisher and AdWords advertiser I notice that many ads showing up on our sites have no identifying words in them. On our scuba page will be an ad for Joe's Scuba School (not real) who's located in Seattle however he doesn't say so.
Our location is South America so my visitors assume that he is locally located and click on his ad. Good for me as a publisher but bad for Joe because it costs him a useless click.
If he had simply added the word Seattle to his ad copy the click probably wouldn't have happened.
I have posted this info before and maybe it's something that AWA could suggest be added to the content information page. It would certainly help conversion rates on the content system which would mean higher payouts for AdSense publishers and higher profits for Google - a win, win, win situation for everyone.
While content for us returns a lower conversion then search it still brings a fairly high number. All our ads are location specific.
Ad Group 1: $0.05 max CPC
"green widget"
"blue greet widget"
"green frog"
"green bird"
red green widget
a broad match
-acme
-a bunch of negative matches
Ad Group 2: $0.10 max CPC
[freedom]
acme freedom
"freedom blue green widget"
My gmail message said:
Subject: Our product blue green widget
Hey! I found a good blue green widget that has will work great as a red green widget for red. You could also use it a green frog, or even a green bird.
It showed an ad from group 2, even when the gmail message didn't have "acme", or "freedom" in it. The ad it picked from the group had the title "Our product beats freedom".
I would have expected that the ad would have been from group 1 since more keywords match, but perhaps the higher bid on group 2 makes the difference?
Also, I have the string "keyword={keyword}" in my URLs. The URL when clicking on the ad included "keyword=acme%20freedom" even though those words were not in my gmail message at all. When you get a click from a Content ad, does the "keyword" passed in the URL make any sense? Why did it pick that one? It doesn't have the highest CTR. Did it just pick one at random once it chose the ad?
