Adwords for content - very irrelevant sites.

[Mark_A]

Have an adgroup only for adsense / content publication on websites. Lots of key terms but all quite tight to our line of business.

This morning I audited the 6 odd sites our ads had appeared on (only one click in a thousand or more exposures).

The sites are completely irrelevant to our business. One was even a model directory (as in women) we are an industrial product company!

What is to do?

[idolw]

Google recommend to create "themed" adgroups for content network. That way they can understand the ad and find proper sites for it. They recommend 15-20 similar keywords per ad group and making more adgroups if more keywords are targetted.

It might have happened due to Interest Based Ads - ads of one topic that follow the user on sites on other topics as google thinks they were searching for it in the past and still may be interested.

[Mark_A]

Well I have kind of done themed adgroups. I had already split the adverts into relevant subsets for adwords appearances and the adsense campaigns are based on that.

I seem to be getting a lot of exposures on websites whose domains are not showing in the network section. (most exposures actually by 5:1) But there are no clicks at all so they cannot be very relevant.

[Baylow]

Use Negative Domains. In the same way you need to use Negative keywords in order to trim out unintentional search query matches you'll also need to use negative domains in content to avoid bad domain matches. Google has pretty good matching technology, but it's not perfect.

[Mark_A]

Hi Baylow, I would use negative domains, but at the moment I can't see which domains the ads are showing on. I have had about 1,000 exposures on 5 domains which I have just excluded and another 5,000 exposures on unlisted domains which have resulted in zero clicks.

[Baylow]

If they are getting impressions and 0 clicks i wouldn't worry too much about them. Google will eventually remove them by virtue of them not performing. They don't have any effect (on the content network) on other placements you may have (in terms of quality score).

[buckworks]

My advice is not to ignore impressions that are getting no clicks. Work at weeding them out, don't just rely on Google eventually removing them. Off-target impressions drag down your clickthrough rates, which will make your ads less competitive within the system unless you're willing to bid more.

In most cases, I'd rather tighten my targeting than open my wallet further!

It's sometimes worthwhile to run low-response impressions just to get your brand out there, but that doesn't accomplish much if a placement is totally off target. Delete the worst duds as you identify them, and consider consider developing separate campaigns to group the highest and lowest performers that actually do send clicks. That will make it easier to bid aggressively where the ROI is likely to be highest.

[netmeg]

Have you gone to visit the Ad Planner yet? You might consider using placements. Rather than advertising to the entire Content Network (I can't get used to calling it the Display Network, sorry G) you run a placement campaign advertising ONLY to sites that you cherry pick. It helps enormously if you can kind of profile your target audience first, write down what all you know about them. And then bop over the Ad Planner to see if it can give you any information on where those types of people tend to hang out, so you can try putting your ads there. It's worked really well for me with some clients, and not so well with others, but it's probably worth a shot.