Site Targeting CPM and CPC?

[ByronM]

Has anyone experimented advertising to both at the same time?

Run a low cost CPM and low cost CPC across a vast number of "Site Targeted" ads to see if mixed coverage offers more traffic?

Just curious also if people have better luck doing CPM or CPC on site targeting? you would think with enough "junk" traffic on sites like MySpace you would see some traffic for low balled bids but i see about 1-2 impressions a day on what used to be a lot more. Perhaps google just doesn't want to fill traffic with my ads just yet hehe

[justshelley]

I haven't done a true A/B test but I do know that I have a lot more control over my spend with CPC and managing CPC is much easier than managing CPM.

I had a horrible experience with MySpace on site targeting where MySpace got deleted two hours after it was turned on because it generated so many clicks but Google continued to run the ad for an additional 24 hours. They justified charging me over $1000 for all those clicks by saying that sometimes it just takes that long for changes to take effect, yada, yada. I pulled old reports from where I had paused other placements and it never take 24 hours on any of my other changes (usually 2 to 3 hours)...they are still sticking by their 24 hour statement.

I'm not telling you not to use MySpace in site targeting...I actually recommend testing different subdomains of MySpace...just start off your MySpace placement at a REALLY low bid (that's where I messed up and why the cost racked up over 24 hours - I let it default to the AdGroup bid).

[buckworks]

let it default to the AdGroup bid

I had an expensive "oops" not long ago related to exactly that. A high-traffic site I wanted to target cheaply ran for most of a day at the ad group default because I goofed something in the Adwords editor. Ouch!

I learned the hard way that it's safer to keep your cheapskate placement bids in a separate ad group from your normal bids, with separate defaults.

[RhinoFish]

separate it for sure, track it closely. try the CPC route please, the CPM route puts the impression-to-click factor's risk completely in your hands, why do that when you can get publishers to accept the risk of G's matching algorithms.

cpm is for spraying far and wide with deep branding budgets. cpc is for targeted roi spending.

if you've got a magic banner that everyone clicks on and you know your ctr is way above the other folks targeting that site, you might carefully try some cpm, but it's not likely to rock.

and remember, there's three ad types, text, banners and click-to-play videos - in cpc, you only play for clicks to your site, but ctp videos let you say more to the viewers... so you can prequal your traffic better... in a cpc model, that's the real magic!