Finding Content partners as to exclude them

want to reduce content costs

[MichaelO]

I have a few campaigns where content costs are rising steeply (in fact they are too high now), probably due to rapid expansion of the content partner network.

I already reduced (wisely or not) in max cpc and number of countries where the add is shown.

I now want to exclude certain sites in the content network. Google support gave me a few, but they are definitely not all. Would content sites be similar to sites that do site targeted campaigns? Does anyone have any clues to find content sites? Or perhaps I wait for my invitation for Google Analytics?

Thanks for your ideas and help,

Michael

[martinibuster]

Why don't you simply "opt out" of content sites altogether? If there are specific sites you want to have your ads showing up in, then create a site targeted campaign on a CPM basis.

Nevertheless, if you are not tracking your visitors then you may lack the data to make the determination about the quality of your contextual advertising visitors.

So before you go fiddling around with your account settings you may want to invest in some analytics to see what your visitors are really doing.

[MichaelO]

Hi Martinibuster,
Thanks for your thoughts.

I do not want to opt out of content sites as they bring about the same no of clicks (double exposure/half CTR) and surprisingly a similar conversion rate. In one case, content gives almost triple the clicks compared to search and still with the same conversion rate. So I hope you understand I do not want to abort content.

I tried CPM but found it costed a lot and gave no results compared to to PPC.

As I see my costs rising every month, even with cost cutting measures, I really am looking for new ways of reducing the clicks by focusing on the most promising content sites. Although I sometimes feel the exposures and clicks are so high, click fraud could be an explanation as well.

Thanks for any new ideas!

Michiel