Their individual CPC's is a few quid - but none have appeared.
I've waited 24 hours and no impressions have been served.
I'm wondering whether it is one of the following:
1. These websites require a massive CPC as they are v popular
2. They only reserve a tiny proportion of their banner rotation to Google placements versus ad networks selling their banner space
Secondly, Google gives little indication where the banner ads will appear within these sites.
Has anyone else experienced this? If so, any thoughts?
Several months ago I was very successfully running placement targeted ads. Then, after the campaign went sour, I took a break.
Fast forward a few months and I started trying to set-up placement targeting ads recently. Only now it is a completely different beast.
Apparently, quality score now affects not only your cost per click or cost per thousand, but can even mean your ad will not show on the content network at all.
After two weeks of going back and forth trying to get STRAIGHT answers from Adwords Reps, I've come to the conclusion that my ads are not running because they went in and manually decided that they didn't like my "business model". Who know what that means since the supporting literature on that is extremely vague, narrowing it to specific industries none of which my advertising pertains to.
Since they are so elusive in their answers as to why campaigns are NOT working, I'm only left to guess what the problem was.
So, here's what I think, and hopefully it can provide some insight into maybe what is going on with your campaign.
1) Check your landing page. If you run CPM placement targeting campaigns your quality score is based SOLELY on your landing page. I have asked whether this is a pass/fail grade or scale based as it is for quality score in regular search CPC campaigns. I was told that it was just a pass/fail, but my experience begs to differ.
2) On some sites you are not able to advertise down to the specific page. I was told just to advertise site wide, which seems to fly in the face of what Google wants with highly relevant ads and high CTR. On these large sites there are so many topics that this doesn't make marketing sense as the CTR for site wide targeting would be so low as to make direct response campaigns impossible.
3) Some sites have site targeting turned off. It is possible for an advertiser to opt-out.
4) After looking at my adsense account I noticed that it is possible for Adsense users (adwords content network users) to set-up a filter to only allow advertisers to advertise based on an approval process rather than a filtering out one.
5) Did you get any impressions to start with? Sometimes when you start a new campaign you will get a few impressions while the system is eying your set-up. You can find out where you ads appeared by using the report tab and see a wealth of information about number of impressions, CPM, CPC etc. That could shed some light onto how much the CPM or CPC is for those sites.
I hope I have provided some insight into what I believe is a horrible advertising experience. If anyone has anything to add, please do so as this seems to be an almost secret type of advertising with Adwords in much need of comparative analysis.
AdwordsAdvisor:
If you come across this thread I have a few suggestions on how you can change this experience for we advertisers that see the benefit of the content network, want to provide highly targeted ads down to the specific web page, and improve the responsiveness of the content network.
1) Please give us a way to see what our landing page quality score is. I have had to make a separate search CPC campaign with the same destination URL as used in my CPM placement targeted campaign, just so that I could get insight into my landing page using the spyglass tool that is only provided in the keyword tab.
2) Give us a better tool to be able to know which sites are available to target with the individual pages that are available. The current placement targeting tool just doesn't give us enough detailed information.
3) Let us know which sites have opted out of placement targeting so we don't waste our time trying to advertise on a site that doesn't allow placement targeting.
4) Let us know which sites have set-up a filter to only allow approved advertisers to placement target on their sites.
5) Educate Adwords Reps about placement targeting since the majority don't know much detailed information about this method of marketing.
6) Have the Adwords Reps not just give us vague and elusive answers as to why our campaigns are not getting impressions and give us specific and helpful ways to start getting impressions. We want to spend money with you, but we can't if you don't make your demands clear.
Basically, for advertisers that are wanting to provide high quality, targeted ads, it is a shame that it is so hard to get a campaign up and running.
I'd be happy to talk with you more in depth about this and help out in any way possible to make this a better experience for placement targeting advertisers.
Until the experience gets better, I have been forced to look to competing companies to run my site targeted CPM campaigns. I just couldn't lose any more time guessing what the problem was, like Jsaipe is trying to do.
It reads;
3) Some sites have site targeting turned off. It is possible for an advertiser to opt-out.
it should read;
3) Some sites have site targeting turned off. It is possible for an ADSENSE PUBLISHER to opt-out.
G, pretty please with sugar on top? you NEED to give indicators for this! how many times have we seen this question! how many people then go jack up their bids and budgets to see if that's what causing the delay... seems like a trap set for newbies to the content banner strategy - one that is easily remedied with feedback to adwords advertisers about approval status for submitted banners.
Image ads have to beat (bid x CTR X etc.) all the text ads or they won't show. So a lot of time you really need to bid high to get them to show at all.
Content is not nearly as cheap as it once was. In a lot of markets it's nearly as high as search so you'll need to bid at least that high.
Google pretty well shut down diet, horoscopes, ringtones, and a bunch of other stuff in the content network. Pretty much anything hypey or that they get a lot of complaints about they shut down. So if you're in any of these niches they'll never even turn your ads on.
Image ads are all human reviewed before they're turned on. And as mentioned above, if they don't like your product or landing page or whatever, they'll never run.
It might take as much as a week to get your ads reviewed and turned on. I've found that if I bid over $1 they get reviewed within 24 hours.
Google really needs to give us a clue what the issues are though for this and everything else. I don't know why they have to be so paranoid and obtuse and never give you a straight answer. Just give us some da*n information so we can make it right.
Personally I think they're all borgs and controlled by a master computer somewhere ;-)
3) Let us know which sites have opted out of placement targeting so we don't waste our time trying to advertise on a site that doesn't allow placement targeting.
Does not the AdPlanner tool allow you to see this information?
[google.com...]
It don't think that it does.
I actually used the adplanner tool you refer to to filter only sites that were available within Google's content network. After choosing a site and setting up a campaign and getting no impressions I was steered in the direction that the site owner didn't allow site targeting by a few different ad reps.
So, I think the adplanner tool just isolates web sites that are within Google's content network and not necessarily available for site targeting.
jumped the gun there.
Cheers
Responses from Google alluded to the fact that the sites I had selected were extremely competitive and that my CPC simply wasn't high enough.
FYI Google also commented on the distinction between placements with and without keywords in the ad group in terms of where you ad will appear on placement targeted sites:
"In a keyword based campaign with Placements, your ads will show on relevant pages on the Placements you have targeted. If there are no keywords in the Placement campaigns the ads will show on any pages on the Placements you have targeted."
Hope this helps
