Unlike Search, the Google Content Network gives you the ability to target an audience before they search for your product or service. Depending on your offer, you’ll get some direct sales of course, but that isn’t the main objective behind such a campaign.

Put it this way. If I’m reading about golf, I’m probably a golfer. I might be interested in improving my swing, buying a set of clubs, or a golfing holiday. I might be interested right now, at this minute, and I might click.

That’s a whole lot of might.

However, most importantly, I’ve seen your ads on a number of different sites that I’ve visited and I’m beginning to associate your brand with my passion for golf. To me, you must be a big company with a big presence in the golfing market. That makes you trustworthy and reliable.

Supporting Your Search Campaign

When I do search and click on a bunch of different sites, who do I choose: The cheapest? The best looking site? Both of those things influence me and more, of course – but I also buy on trust. Trust is worth EVERYTHING in a sales transaction.

The basis of the strategy is that you can show your ads to a wider target audience at a low cost to increase awareness of both your brand and your products and services. In marketing speak, referred to as “brand recall”, an important measurement of a marketing campaign’s success.

The first area then, as well as generating some direct sales, is to support the conversion rates on your Search Campaign.

For example, if you are advertising holiday cottages, you might target content such as hiking, water sports, fishing, bird-watching, etc. Your site and brand will then be exposed to an audience that might soon search for a holiday cottage. If and when they do, you can expect greater conversion rates from your search campaign.

Innovation = No Search Traffic

The second area this works well is the introduction of a new product or innovation. There is no search traffic, so how do you sell it on paid search? It’s tough, except perhaps bidding on a problem that it solves, but that’s a whole other article. What you can do though, is stimulate a relevant audience by introducing the idea.

Let’s pick something random. You’ve created a 30-something golfing holiday product where like minded individuals can meet and find love and play a bit of golf (Ahem. I did say random!). There’s no directly relevant search traffic for this at all – you could bid on “golf holidays”, but there’s a big chunk of that spend that isn’t your target audience. It won’t convert too well and you’ll burn your budget pretty quick.

On the Content Network, we can target golfers based on what they’re reading about: GOLF.

In some instances, we can even target the demographic; male, female, age range. The ads introduce the idea and those that are curious or interested will click and might enquire, request a brochure or sign up for your newsletter. Hell, you might even get some bookings. But the real value here is reaching your target audience to generate interest in something they didn’t even know existed. Over time, this will generate search traffic for your brand and what you do.

Having generated a good chunk of profit for our clients this way, we’d strongly recommend considering a Content Network campaign.

8 tips for creating a sound Content Network Campaign

1. Always create separate campaigns for Search and for Content. The structure, strategies and ads are very different and you’ll want to measure performance and ROI separately too.
2. In each ad group, pick 6-10 relevant, tightly-themed keywords to target content pages your audience would be reading.
3. Create attention-grabbing ads that will stand out from the page and help your audience remember your brand, even if they don’t click.
4. Image ads work far better than text ads – use the Ad Builder for the first pass and invest in professionally designed ads as performance warrants it.
5. We wouldn’t recommend the Content Network without Conversion Tracking. Although we won’t necessarily expect many direct conversions from Content ads, measuring View Through Conversions is critical.
6. Expect a much lower CTR from Content, but monitor which sites are generating traffic carefully. Increase your bids on sites that work well and add poor sites as negatives to stop your ads showing there.
7. Be patient. Search data can be analysed for yesterday, but data from 30 days ago is more relevant for Content, depending on how long your buying cycle is.
8. Create a small Search Campaign, perhaps even just bidding on your site name, brand or the name of your product. You’ll pick up the cheap clicks as the search volume increases.

Ask a Google AdWords Professional about this

The headlines:

• 43% of iPhone owners earn salaries in excess of £65,000
• 200 million Internet enabled phones shipped in 2009 with 22% growth projected for 2010.
• 38% of mobile phones worldwide will be smartphones by 2013
• UK mobile searches increased by 260% for commercial keywords from 2008 to 2009

Whether your business is suited to mobile browsing or not, mobile should be on your agenda.

Mobile Advertising

As a method for reaching your audience at the right time, mobile is growing faster that any other existing marketing medium. The latest advances in mobile technology have developed significantly and mobile advertising has come a long way.

No longer limited to SMS messaging, the mobile opportunity has evolved into a highly-targeted platform for advertising to an audience ready to buy, find or engage. Mobile advertising is mainly aimed at users on iPhones and other similar mobile devices with full internet access.

How Mobile Works

6 things to consider

1. Is your site usable on a mobile?
2. Is your target audience likely to search for or browse your product or service on a mobile device?
3. How quickly does your content load on a mobile device?
4. Can you engage a visitor on a mobile device and generate an action quickly (more quickly that a desktop device, for example)?
5. Examples of what works well; find your nearest location, opt-in for some information, find your phone number; browse your products or even buy.
6. Examples of what doesn’t necessarily work well; lengthy, technical content. Lengthy data capture forms. Large image files.

The Benefits

Right now, the mobile market is less competitive than desktop, with reported conversion costs being lower than desktop devices – the time to position your site as a market leader is now.

Creating separate campaigns with different targeting, you can segment and measure the response and ROI independently for mobile, or even for specific types of devices.

Mobile Marketing Plan

1. If your target audience never (ever) searches for what you do using a mobile, or you’re not ready to exploit it, turn it off – but remember to come back to it later.
2. Check your site’s statistics to see how many visitors use mobile browsers.
3. Segment your campaign(s), creating a dedicated mobile campaign with it’s own budget and performance data so that you can measure the response and ROI.
4. Targeting is the same as desktop devices and the same best practice applies; segment Google Search and Search Partner networks and the Content Network.
5. Depending on traffic volume and performance, consider a dedicated mobile version of your site. You can detect the browser type and size when a visitor lands on your site and redirect to the right version automatically – a desktop visitor gets the desktop site, a mobile visitor gets the mobile site.

Ask a Google AdWords Professional about this

But there’s a little-known element that’s really beginning to annoy me and a lot of the other search community: the Search Network.

You’ll be familiar with the two primary networks; Google Search – essentially, the Google you know and love, and then there’s the content network where your ads are showing alongside some forum or blog that contains the keywords on which you’re bidding.

The Search Network is somewhere in the middle of these two and relates to sites that technically are search engines like Google, and merely send the visitor’s search query off to Google, and then get Google’s data back. And your paid for ads too. And yes, you’re still paying per click the same way you do on Google Search.

It’s good idea in principle, at least for sites like www.sky.com and www.orange.com. These are search engines where the audience will behave in a very similar way to the audience on Google.

However, this is where it starts to get a little concerning. Google doesn’t publish a list of its “Search Partners”, so there’s no way of knowing in advance which sites will be carrying your ads, and where your money is being spent.

Depending on your market and your product, for example, you might not really want your ads to show on www.ebay.co.uk, or Amazon.co.uk. Or perhaps you do? Either way, you really want to be able to measure the effectiveness of each of these sites carrying your ads and the clicks that come from them – how many Amazon clicks does it take for you to achieve a sale?

Right now, the only way of knowing this is to use Google Analytics or similar software to check the source of visitors to your site, how they behave, and if they convert to a sale or not.

It isn’t currently possible to run a campaign only on the Search Network, or to see where your ads are showing, or which site individual clicks are originating from. You can’t currently calculate your Cost Per Aquisition, the average ad positions or the average cost per click. All of these stats are rolled up in the stats for Google Search in your campaign.

So what happens if you don’t want your ads showing on a particular property like www.FreeIndex.co.uk or www.DoorOne.co.uk? A nice simple site exclusion tool like the one provided on the Content Network? No, I’m afraid not – you have to actually call Google and request that they manually exclude your ads from showing on those sites.

Maybe some of these sites perform really well and have a great CTR and awesome CPA figures. And maybe they don’t. But without the ability to individually target ads for the audience, without the ability to measure it’s effectiveness, it’s difficult to make a case one way or the other.

You could always opt out of the Search Network, of course, but there’s definitely some good quality traffic in there you’d be missing out on.

If only we could tell which traffic it was.