Separating Content and Search Campaigns

Hi guys,

What are your thoughts on separating Content Network campaigns from Search Network Campaigns?

Do you do so or do you enable both within the same campaign?

I separate for the following reasons:

Because the Content and Search networks are not the same type of medium, we cannot allocate budgets and optimize the same way for both.

I did this separation for an account I just took over, and the clicks dropped like a Bad Habbit!

What happened?

If you are going to run content ads I absolutely recommend they be in separate campaigns so they can be tracked separately.

What clicks dropped? Search or content or both? Someone recently mentioned that they thought the positions of their search ads dropped when they remembered to go back and disable content ads after a new campaign ran for a while.

They tried enabling content again to see if that helped and it did not. There is no way to know whether their ads dropped because they opted out of content or they dropped because their CTR or bids were low compared to other ads.

The more advertisers you bid against who schedule their ads to run only during certain hours or on certain days or pause and resume ads the less stable the positions or your ads will be and the more erratic your impressions and sales will be.

If the graphs on your Account Snapshot page have curves instead of spikes consider yourself lucky and make hay while the sun shines because you never know how long it will last.

Google appears to be rationing traffic based on many variables. If you want to make more sales I now recommend deleting all broad match keyword phrases and adding more phrase and exact match phrases including words in multiple orders (to pick up the traffic you might lose by deleting the broad match phrases).

You might also test raising your Daily Budgets even if you aren't spending anywhere near them as that often increases the amount of traffic Google is willing to send you. Raising bids can do that too. Always raise budgets if you substantially raise bids.

Both campaigns (search and content) dropped in clicks.

My theory is this regarding this matter;

Since I separated the search and content, and basically creating 2 separate campaigns, I might have affected my original campaigns overall quality score. The campaigns was producing massive clicks, and when I separated the Search from the Content, both campaigns stopped producing clicks and positions dropped etc..

Your thoughts!

Since I don't run the two together an rarely run content at all I don't have any insights. Everything you do at Google can cause massive changes. I think it was Aussie Webmaster who mentioned have good success with content so I would ask him.

Joey_Skulls,

After reading both posts that you have made, my question would be to ask if your conversion has dropped. Impressions and clicks are great, but if they are not converting, then it doesn't mean anything.

I have run both separated campaigns (content and search separated), and combined (where content is added into regular search). To give you my personal opinion, running content is a risky business. Everyone plus their brother who operates a blog will or wants to sign up for AdSense. This is on top of other more reputable sites running AdSense. This flattens out your consumer base and makes it harder to define where your traffic is coming from. To my knowledge (and I could be wrong) Google does not distribute a list of all domains that have accounted for your "clicks". It is much easier to track, analyze, and strategize when you know your clicks are either coming from Google or their "Search Network" (i.e. - Ask.com, dogpile.com, etc.) Also, with Google tweaking their algo just a slight bit - to make broad match broader, your content ads are going to get spread even further.

Right now, I am not running any content through Google.

When I was running Google Content, it produced an immense volume of impressions, an immense amount of clicks, an accelerated budget accumulation, and not nearly the conversion rate that would be needed to sustain a Content run.

As mentioned before, if your conversion rate has also dropped due to the separation, you might be able to more easily find out why it has dropped, whether it be from Conent, or Search.

I would almost suggest that you test a side campaign through the Content network, with a set budget per day/week/your choosing. After a set period of time, analyze the different conversion rates between search+search network, and Google content - seeing which is closer to normal and where the delta lies.

In all of the accounts I've seen that were running content (because it was the default) I have only rarely seen any conversions and almost none that were profitable.

AussieWebmaster has posted that he has had success running content and some advertisers are able to generate profitable sales, usually after blocking some content sites. Targeting only specific sites would be a more likely path.

It is not so much where the ads appear as the simple difference between content and search. Someone searching for something is more likely to be interested in buying in the near future than someone clicking out of curiosity.

Hello all,

I am new to the forum but not to PPC marketing. This topic has sparked my interest because i notice many people having a lot of trouble with content style advertising. To address your question about content

Content should be separated 100% from your normal campaigns. The reason is content does not work the same as PPC. For one the adgroup containing the keywords are a compilation of the 1st 50 terms used to generate your results.

Example in content adgroup 1 you might have the following keywords if you were driving traffic to a dating website.(Date, dating, singles, girls, men, lonely, 30's, forties)

As you can see in a normal PPC campaign you would not normally bid on the term girls, 30's and forties, but in the realm of content these are a must to highly define your traffic so that you are not send millions of useless traffic.

I would recommend you go read googles help on content campaigns or speak with a google rep on effective content campaign building because you cannot simply create a PPC style campaign and set it to google search and content. You will end up driving an endless amount of traffic with no return on your investment.

I hope this information helps, please let me know if you have any other questions.

Dating on content?
That sounds dangerously expensive. The industry is to close to the XXX industry and might generate lots of crazy clicks and bad conversion rates.

i would agree, it can get very costly and it does not seem there is a limit on traffic expectancy. However I have been testing it and CPA is not too bad, but still higher than average.

I am currently testing different models to try and gain more control over content, however it seems nobody has definite answers on content and those who have some control over it still seem to be amateurs at best with this type of media.