All keywords Paused

But account still costing money

[chewy]

Let this be a lesson to me and you all.

Keep in mind I thought I was a pro - but I guess I need to relearn the interface, specifically in regard to content advertising.

Started doing some super local advertising for a local private day care center. (I'm on the marketing committee.)

I set Google to advertise at a circle 15 miles around the school. (I trusted this would work, but wanted to get some data - and I sure got some...)

Ran some keywords, got some good data and I thought I turned the account off in the middle of March. Total spend $ 150.

Today I see the account ran up another 200 bucks all by itself.

All keywords are paused. What gives?

Sure enough, content keeps on ticking, even with all keywords paused.

Is there an easy way to turn off content as well?

Not that I can see.

Moral of the story - I can NOW clearly see that CONTENT Advertising is not effectively geo-limited like it should be. What a surprise.

Good thing it was my money and not theirs, and I consider this a useful proof.

At least 1/3 of that 200 bucks went to the 49 states that we don't care about. So inflate the cost by 1/3.

The good news is that in our state, content does appear to be reasonably focused on the east end, where the density of population is and where we want it to be getting those 'cheap' impressions.

This will be interesting trying to figure out which content sources are producing the good traffic and which are the clinkers.

[netmeg]

Ok, I'm sorry that happened. But you need to understand how content works. It sounds like you might be running managed placements with your geo targeting. That type of campaign doesn't need keywords - it just shows to the sites that fit the placements; you can add keywords to refine it further, but they aren't necessary for it to keep running.

Why would you pause the campaign by pausing the keywords, instead of just pausing the campaign, or even the ad group? For that matter, is this a Content Only campaign, or is it set to Content & Search?

[chewy]

My mistake to pause the words rather than the group or campaign.

Set up as Content and Search by design - I know, set them up separately. Will do.

Yes indeed, content doesn't care about terms.

Fortunately this was a cheap lesson to learn this time around.

And analytics and AW reports tell me exactly where the clinker sources are and where I need to spend the money now going forward - so this, while seemingly wasteful, was quite informative.

Apparently content doesn't care about geo targeting either.

Always learning something - even if again!

[netmeg]

Content does use geo targeting, but I don't think it works exactly the same way as Search geo targeting. I haven't done any geo targeting in the Content Network for such a narrow area, so I'd have to play with it some. Probably set a really low daily budget, and then some site placement reports to see where the ads are going.