Now it has been a while what is your impression?
Mine has been that I have had to remove them as while the clicks were reasonable they were far too expensive making me wonder whether the sites they were featured on had any say in the min. CPC.
It is strange that while we are content with adwords that the clicks on the content ads were in general a good 400 - 1000% more expensive.
Any other thoughts now we have given it a little time?
Unfortunately we didnt get any "free" clicks though the trial period. Immediately it finished we started getting far more impressions and far more expensive clicks! We are thinking of disabling them
Wonder if others have similar experiences or comments on the content ads now that we have all had time to judge them a little better.
It does seem that Google is only serving the very high CPC ads, and filtering out the low costs ones. Thay may explain why our costs for content clicks are far more, as they are only using those that have high cost per clicks and filtering out the low cost ones.
Yes, we will be disabling ours.
Google started running before it started to walk when it comes to a quality controlled PPC program. Fraud and neglagence is rampant in PPC programs that lack Quality Control. We give far too much credit and put far too much faith in Google's ability to just come into this long-established marketplace without facing major problems along the way. I will be patient with Google, but as I have said many times, I am afraid of the ramifications of these actualities on the Google of the future.
One reason for these increased CPC's from content sites is that they do not take into account negative keywords very well. I can see how it works with search engine queries, and i suspect they use some method of scraping content pages to check for negative keywords (if there is any way they can do this efficiently), but it could not be as good as theur "pure" negative word filters on search engines.
We have many negative keywords as many of our terms have different meanings. For example if your keyterm is "market" do you mean markets as in consumers or food or stock markets? We use neg terms and longer phrases to make sure we dont get wasted money and decreased CTR. Im not sure that neg. terms are working as well in content sites.
I recently (about 00:00 EST 4/1) re-enabled content ads for one of my campaigns on a test basis.
I want to see what kind of changes I see since the trial period ended. I'll know more in about a week or mabye two, but I'm still dubious to the idea.
