Placement Reports - Give me ALL the Info

[justshelley]

A couple of days ago, I spoke with my agency rep about the new placement reports. I continue having problems with getting ALL the information on where my content ads are showing. My rep said that this is because of "certain agreements" that Google has made with "certain publishers". Those agreements are starting to get VERY annoying. I continue to get slammed with clicks but my placement report only gives me a trickle of information on where those clicks are coming from.

Every day, I review the reports and every day, I exclude sites because Google's idea of "relevance" and mine are not even close to the same. For instance...I did a test adgroup for content only for "solve adwords". The text ad is relevant and uses adwords, solve and solving in the text and there are three keywords: solve adwords, solving adwords and solves adwords. My ads are being shown on sites related to mathmatical equations! These are not technical websites related to adwords, internet marketing or search engines...they are websites related to education and teaching and just plain math.

That is very upsetting to me. It makes me wonder if the whole Google strategy for content is centered around getting massive amounts of exposure on and traffic from any and all content websites and that Google hopes that by having such a broad strategy for distribution that you "might" end up on a relevant content site and get a conversion? The problem with this strategy is the massive number of ads that are being shown on totally non-relevant websites and getting totally unqualified clicks.

Google, I thought you wanted to turn around the reputation for content? The recent news stories about purging certain websites was a great start. The placement report COULD be great PR if you quit hiding information...but you also need to seriously rethink your distribution methods for content.

[Roadrunner]

You might want to consider changing your keywords for content instead of excluding sites. If you only provide 3 keywords how should the targeting mechanism know what you actually want to run on? Matches on content are broad matches. Your campaign would probably do a lot better if you added keywords like "search engine marketing", "adwords", "monetization" etc. This would not be a good idea for search (too expensive) but it helps on content to describe the topic that you are really aiming for.
If you continue to exclude sites you will end up having to exclude thousands of them even once the reports show all of them.

[idii]

Some people post articles on the placement report a few months ago. I talked to the support of G, they told me the report will be available in June, but I still can't find it anywhere in my account.

justshelley
It's good to hear that you finally have this report. My experience with G's content network is, I once started a campaign in Europe, including Turkey, and in just a single day, the clicks from the two major cities of Turkey, Istanbul and Ankara, jumps from 0 to 1200 clicks per day. When I wrote to the G support, they responded that they didn't find any unusual activities from a single IP, all of the these 1200 clicks were distributed evenly in these two cities. Meanwhile, visitors from the rest of the world only account for less than 15% of my daily visits, and my conversion from Turkey is ZERO! Thus, I turned off the keywords that were described by G support as POPULAR.

Thus, I got the impression that G has lots of ideas of making the "revelance" with its giant network. We have to try each possible keywords combination before we can get a better solution. Justshelley, you're not alone.