Do you harness the full potential of "placement targeting" ?

[DaStarBuG]

Hello

Today I made a big change to my website that hopefully will increase my earnings a lot over time.

I run a medical forum for patients to ask medical questions.
My forum has several medical categories with different topics.

So far I made extensive use of Adsense channels to track each of my Ads separately.
I also activated "placement targeting" for the best performing ad placements.

However I did not realize the full potential of "placement targeting" until yesterday after I talked to my direct advertising marketer.

Q: What is the main goal of an advertiser?
A: To show there ads to their target group which most likely will convert

Q: Is wider or narrower targeting more effective?
A: I think it depends but mostly the more narrow the target group is, the better the Ads perform

Just as info to you:
CPM prices for a very narrow targeting e.g. topics about "cough" or "skin rash" are 40-50$ (campaigns that my direct advertising marketer runs)
Campaigns that are not that narrow e.g. health only get 10-20$ CPM.
Yes, it makes that much of a difference.

So what did I do?

I have several AD Placements on my forum but I did this change to the best performing AD which is the large rectangle above the fold next to the welcome message (shown on every page).

What I did is I created a separate channel for each forum category that is interesting to advertisers e.g. health, diseases, nutrition, alternative medicine, etc.
Each of these channels was selected for placement targeting and got a description that outlined the topics in which these ads will be shown.

Then I created several large rectangle ads and assigned each one a category channel I created before.

Now each thread in a specific forum shows the Ad with the channel that was created for this specific forum.

Now each advertiser can narrow down the placement targeting on my website to a certain topic which suites his campaign best.
For example an advertiser who is selling homeopathy can now target his Ads to my forum "alternative medicine" and his ads are only shown to people interested in "alternative medicine".
This way conversion and CTR should increase quite a bit and a lot more advertisers should use placement targeting on my website over time and with that increase my earnings.

What are your thoughts on this topic?
How do you handle placement targeting?

Kind regards

StarBuG

[DaStarBuG]

@Future Like in this thread discussed I think it is one month data for low traffic channels and 50k+ AIs for High Traffic channels to get listed in Adwords.

@Gandhalf:

So far it is not possible to see how much a single channel was targeted only in general.
This is (in my opinion) due to the fact that Google protects its advertisers.
If you could see on a channel that some advertiser is bidding high for your site you could easily find out which Ad he runs and track him down.
And that is bad for Google Business ;)

What you can see is that placement targeted ADs increase and with that you will notice your earnings increase

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I don't harness the full potential of "placement targeting".

I won't until Google stops showing one ad only for placement targeting when two (468x60) or four (326x280) look much better and give a better CTR. A higher paying single ad doesn't earn me as much as an actual click on normal ads.

[spharalsia]

DaStarBug, I've implemented placement targeting by setting up targetable categories. Now I'd like to direct advertisers to those placements. However, I can't seem to find them on AdWords ... which makes it difficult to direct advertisers to them. Where should I be looking?

[DaStarBuG]

Like I stated several times before, I think it is one month data for low traffic channels and 50k+ AIs for High Traffic channels to get listed in Adwords. Which means your channels wont show up for advertisers on Adwords until either they are one month old or reached 50k impressions.

[DaStarBuG]

You don't.

But you can see if your placement targetings go up

[DaStarBuG]

Ok over one month has passed and my channels with less then 50k AIs are still not listed in AdWords.

So it seems that only Channels that reach more then 50-60k AIs will be seen by AdWords publishers.

To bad for highly target but low traffic channels.

I will keep you updated

[DaStarBuG]

Here are some statistics on the effect of placement targeting:

September 2010: 3,07% of my Ad Impressions were placement targeted
October 2010: 3,74% of my Ad Impressions were placement targeted
November 2010: 4,89% of my Ad Impressions were placement targeted

Compared to September 2010 in November 2010 the placement targeted Ad impressions raised about 154%

September 2010: Placement targeted Ads earned on average 92,3% the CPM of contextual Ads
October 2010: Placement targeted Ads earned on average 96,3% the CPM of contextual Ads
November 2010: Placement targeted Ads earned on average 101,6% the CPM of contextual Ads

Compared to September 2010 in November 2010 the placement targeted CPM raised about 153%

Seems promising so far.

[zerillos]

question. if my channels are not open for placement targeting, why am i still getting placement targeted ads?

[DaStarBuG]

I think it is possible for AdWords Advertisers to placement target
a whole website even if their channels are not set for placement
targeting. Or maybe you missed one? :)

[cien]

Like I stated several times before, I think it is one month data for low traffic channels and 50k+ AIs for High Traffic channels to get listed in Adwords. Which means your channels wont show up for advertisers on Adwords until either they are one month old or reached 50k impressions.

Where exactly did you get that from Dastarbug? Got any links?

Anyway, thanks for this discussion. Although Imps and CTR are low on my placement targeted channels (very high epc on those clicks by the way), I think they have driven the contextual ads's EPC very high in my case since both type of channels participate in the same auction.

Hey, very helpful forum you got going..

[edited by: cien at 5:15 pm (utc) on Dec 3, 2010]

[DaStarBuG]

The data was an educated guess by monitoring my ad placements appearing in AdWords.

However still several channels don't appear in AdWords even though they reached over 60k impressions and are older then one month.

[netmeg]

I think it is possible for AdWords Advertisers to placement target a whole website even if their channels are not set for placement targeting.

Yes, of course it is possible to do this. The channels just provide an extra layer of granularity for targeting, particularly good for large or multi-themed sites (like for example a newspaper) If no channel placements exist, then I can still target the entire site.

[hairycoo]

Any tips on what name/description to have for targetable channels? I went to the placement tool in adwords to see what information advertisers would have accesss to and the Name of the custom channel is nowhere to be seen?

[hairycoo]

Sorry, where exactly do you go in Adwords to see if/how the custom channels show up?

[DaStarBuG]

AdWords > Opportunities > Placement tool