I've built a campaign containing lots of quite specific phrases such as "lovely pretty red widgets" and "large noisy blue widgets" ('red widgets' and 'blue widgets' are extremely popular phrases, so I'm hoping to mop up some traffic round the edges).
The results of my campaign intrigue me - all the traffic comes from the content network, where the average position is around 2. None comes from search. Is this because:
1. No one searches on 'lovely pretty red widgets', but it's a phrase that does appear in people's sites, so it triggers content bidding, but not search bidding.
2. People do search on 'lovely pretty etc' but the bids are so high for 'red widgets' my ads never get a look in (I certainly don't see my ads when I search for them). So why do they do so well on the content network?
3. Something else entirely.
The reason I ask is I'm wondering if increasing my content bids would have any affect? Would a higher bid get me onto more sites, and hence get more impressions? Or just increase my average position. Option 1 above suggests not, options 2 & 3 suggest content bidding is more complex than I thought, and maybe it might.
Thanks everyone in advance!
Minty.
I generally opt out all content matching stuff due to low conversions.
you can as well view the position, page impressions etc in the campaign to see if there are any searches being made.
I would check carefully as if the positions in Google search are good and no impression are being registered I would tend to believe the content match searches are not what you are lookin for. Then again I could be wrong.
As the previous poster suggested, sometimes I have found the traffic to be not worth the money and therefore I stop using it completely. However, I have other campaigns where content ads work very well for me. Have you turned on conversion tracking? That will tell you whether that content traffic is junk or not.
For example, I once had an ad for "facelift surgery" showing up on an Epinions page reviewing the Facelift album by Alice in Chains. Totally off topic.
True, but is it a bad thing or a good thing?
Imagine if somebody went to Google, typed in "facelift" and then found your site. When they get to your site there's not a single thing that interests them... with one exception: that little ad in the corner that says "facelift surgery". So they click on it.
I used to get all upset when I saw off-topic ads showing up on my pages, and I vowed one night to remove them all (by blocking various advertisers in the Google Adsense Thingie). After many hours of performing this thankless task I finally got my website with 100% on-topic advertisements everywhere.
Hurray! Hurray! No more off-topic ads, anywhere!
Only one problem.... my revenue went down. I wiped out the block-list, invited all those off-topic ads to come back to my site, and now I've learned to love them.
minty99, i think you have to just try raising bids and seeing what happens. i don't think this is something that can be predicted.
