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]
Initial Site Target thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Note: it is images only - no text ads.
Too bad, I think they would have much better luck for the advertisers/themselves with text ads than "click the monkey" ads.
Get rid of the animated click-a-monkey flashy banners and replace them with a screen shot of rendered HTML. Choose the standard dirty blue link with underline, so it looks just like a text ad, as a GIF.
I won't reveal stats but suffice to say it had a positive impact on CTR
Site-targeted campaigns can include text ads, image ads, or both. Site-targeted ads will appear in the same sizes and the same page positions as standard keyword-targeted ads.
Does this mean that if there are four CPM ads being shown on a leader board and my ECPM is $10 I get paid $40 for every thousand impressions?
$2.00 USD is the lowest max CPM that advertisers can set.
That’s too low. How will I possibly know which ads are causing my earnings to drop unless Adsense tells me that these ads are running on CPM and at this cost per thousand impressions.
When a publisher site is chosen, Google needs to display the ad formats that the site uses.
I was able to set up site target campaigns that can never receive an impression.
"Expanded text ads are available when you run a site-targeted campaign with Google AdWords."
"Expanded text ads are not yet available to AdWords advertisers. We expect to make both site targeted campaigns and expanded text ads available to all AdWords advertisers in the near future."
since you can bid lower than .05 per bid on CPM campaigns, is it possible to get a better ROI for a click-thru campaign even though you are paying bye the impression?
i know the system is designed for impressions and branding, but with the lower minimum bid, and the ability to site-target, it seems that it would theoretically be possible to achieve better ROI in certain instances than the CPC model.
any thoughts on this?
Like whoop01 asks, is this feature again only available to a select group because I am seeing no options to create a Site Targeted ad? I would like to try!
This feature is by a mass invite that went out last night / this morning.
I've heard that the feature will become widely available some time in the very near future.
Maybe Google will unveil it officially at the conference next week?
Includes PageRank and Alexa to determine which sites you would like to target.
[edited by: eWhisper at 9:41 pm (utc) on June 14, 2005]
[edit reason] Please don't drop URLs. [/edit]
I assume it takes your key word/phrase and queries selected search enhgine(s), then spiders those sites looking for specific text (i.e. googlesyndication.com) that is in the code. If the site does have the specific code, then it queries Alexa and Google PR to determine those stats.
But that's just a theory...
When a publisher site is chosen, Google needs to display the ad formats that the site uses
That's a bit of a problem. Since everything is pulled by the on-page js G doesn't really know what formats a publisher is using -- or is going to use -- at any one time. It can suss it out when the media bot spiders each page, but that seems to be a clumsy way to do it.
On the Adsense side publishers are completely in the dark, have no idea what's happening. It's possible that as on the advertiser side only certain publisher sites are involved in this beta, but again, no way of knowing.
Now the advertiser side of me is very curious about cpm. In my quite competitive niche in order to compete with the deep pockets my ads have to be so extremely targeted that the time involved versus the return just isn't worth it; cpm might be a good alternative.
Hope G runs this beta long enough to iron out all the kinks before releasing it to all. I'd really like to see a very good product come out of it.
according to the adwords blog, it seems that site-targeting has been released to everyone... but i am still not seeing anything in my account.
Hi elsewhen, just stopped by for a few minute before my first round of meetings, and saw your post. Glad you're an IAW reader!
So, first follow the 'find out' link in the last paragraph of that post. On the page you're taken to, look towards the bottom for text that reads:
What do I do now?If you would like to test the new functionality, please follow the simple setup instructions.
Click on that link, and you're on your way.
AWA
- Yes, you can do text or image ad with site targeting.
- I'm not sure if it really has been released to everyone, however it's hard to find even if it has been released to you. The only way to see the option to do it is to create a new ad campaign, and choose Site Targeting instead of Keyword/Search for the campaign type. You can't change an already created campaign to site targeting.
- Overall it's okay, but I was disappointed by a few things. First, it's hard to find out information about the sites to choose if you want to appear there. You have to copy and paste their URL into your browser window and go look yourself. There's no info besides a really huge range of traffic they get. The range is so big it's hard to know the difference between the traffic levels on a majority of the sites. Also not seeing supporting ad sizes is not good.
- My results were terrible for a text ad I ran. I payed over $1 per click for a site I normally can get an abundance of clicks at in the $0.05 to $0.15 range. I doubt I got much in the way of valuable branding from that text ad. Branding results will obviously be better from image ads.
