Placement targeting - no impressions after 1-2 weeks?

Any way to speed up placement targeting?

[limitup]

I've been playing around a lot with placement targeting lately, but I seem to have a problem getting my ads to show.

I'll target a bunch of domains, enter a super high max CPM, and after 1-2 weeks my ad is lucky to be shown on half of them. Is there some way to speed up the process, or other factors that would be preventing my ads from being shown?

A related problem is that even once my ad does start appearing on a certain site, it may stop showing for a few days or a week, and then start showing again.

No matter how high I set my max CPM I can't seem to get my ads to show reliably all the time. Is this normal?

[limitup]

Anyone? Surely I'm not the only one who has experienced this...?

[buckworks]

Are you talking about text ads or image ads?

[limitup]

Text ads

[buckworks]

I have experienced delays with image ads but not with text ads. Sorry, I have no suggestions.

[georgiek50]

I just got done chatting w/ an Adwords representative about this. He really had no clue why. I had some placements running for a few months and now the traffic has stopped completely. I was thinking perhaps the site owner is blocking the ad. Nothing else comes to mind.

The guy did mention that it might be a landing page quality issue but I don't think that's the case since my CPC Content network traffic has increased.

Anyone else have any ideas?

[PPC Consultant]

trying upping the bid...

[georgiek50]

The bid is already astronomical compared to what it used to be. The representative told me that the ads should show based on the bids.

[koncept]

I too have this problem... i have very high bids on a bunch of placements, and now after at least a month none of the ads are showing yet. I thought maybe the site owners had blocked me, but I don't think it could be the case that they ALL blocked me. I really love the placement idea, but if the ads never show then what's the point?

[georgiek50]

hmmm... so we're NOT alone with this problem?

One quick thought... Are you guys also running CPC ads on content that could be "competing" with the placement ads? I went into my CPC campaign and blocked the URLs that I have on placement as a test. Perhaps they are conflicting with each other.

Here's my theory on this. Perhaps Google looks at your campaigns and decides to serve the CPC ad instead of the CPM ad, but then... the CPC ad is outbid by the other advertisers.

[koncept]

Well, my placement ads are CPC, not CPM. And although I am using the content network as well as placements, I have bid much much higher for the placements, so I don't think it's a 'competition' issue in my case.

[limitup]

Yeah I also thought maybe my keyword-targeted content network ads were competing, but most of the domains aren't getting any clicks there either.

Site owners blocking you is always a possibility, but in this case I'm talking about 100+ domains and there's no way they have all blocked me.

I guess I'll also try blocking all these domains in my other campaigns and see if that does anything ...

The only other thing I can think of is that the ads aren't showing because Google thinks the landing page is not appropriate or doesn't have a high enough quality score ... but I don't really think that is the case. In most cases my site is extremely related to the domains I'm trying to get my ads on.

[netmeg]

But unfortunately, with the Content Network if there is a QS problem, there's no way of knowing... except that your ads slow down and eventually stop showing altogether.

Try writing some new text ads, and changing your ad group names.

[georgiek50]

Well, after having a chat w/ a Google representative who basically told me that he has no idea why this could be happening, I've decided on a different (and better) approach:

Cut out the middleman (The Big 'G') and go straight to the site owners for banner ad deals. The CPM will be lower since Google isn't taking their cut AND the traffic will be measurable and dependable.

[limitup]

Well yeah we do that too, but we also like to get traffic from the hundreds if not 1000s of other sites we normally get traffic from via the content network. Many of them don't sell advertising directly, and obviously it is not practical to manage 100s or 1000s of ad buys even if you could ...