EBizInsider

Imagine you could quickly and easily advertise on every message board, blog and news site across your industry. Imagine creating text and banner ads for thousands of potential new customers. Imagine your ads on competing sites! Stop imagining. You can do all of this and more with contextual advertising.

Once you’ve optimized your pay-per-click for search, content networks are a great way to get your name out to potential customers. The major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) offer contextual advertising. They partner with thousands of content sites to place ad blocks throughout each site. When you turn on the content network, the search engine will scan the content of that campaign and compare it against sites in the content network. When they find a match, your ads can run on that site. Your ads may display on blogs, news sites, forums and even competing online stores.

Content networks charge on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, but network bids are set on the ad group level instead of the keyword level. This is because engines look at the sum of all the keywords and ads, rather than the individual parts. You can choose separate content bids or let the engines determine your content bid from your search bids.

Content networks can extend your brand far beyond your current marketing efforts. They tend to have a higher volume of impressions, so more people are seeing your name. Even if the effect isn’t felt directly through your pay-per-click campaigns, you may still see an increase in traffic. It takes time and testing to maximize your content network results. Be patient.

Content Network Best Practices:

• Test in Google first. Google has the best reporting features. Optimize your content campaign and expand to Yahoo! and MSN when you start getting results.

• Create a separate content-only campaign. You can run content in the same campaign as search, but you can judge performance better with content in its own campaign. Consider creating a separate budget for content ads while you are in the testing phase.

• Use broad match keywords. Since the engines look at the whole of your ad groups rather than individual keywords, you only need a broad match. Using more than 50 keywords in one ad group increases the difficulty for search engines to determine the ad group’s theme.

• Use negative keywords. If you sell flowers, but not roses, you should make “rose” a negative keyword to avoid showing on sites dedicated specifically to that flower.

• Avoid dynamic insertion ads. Dynamic insertion ads automatically pull the keyword that triggered your ad in a search and place it in the ad text. This works well on search because it makes the ad more relevant to each user’s search query. Since there are no searches being performed on content sites, the keyword used is random and may not make much sense.

• Exclude sites with low performance. Monitor traffic either with placement reports (in Google Adwords) or an analytics package. If a site is delivering low quality traffic, add it to an excluded site list that works similarly to negative keywords.

• Use a mix of generic & specific keywords. While you wouldn’t use generic words like “flowers” or “hats” in a regular search campaign, consider adding some in your content campaign. Mixing broad industry terms with brand and product keywords gives the search engines a more complete picture of your business and the types of sites you want displaying your ads.

• Write a strong call to action. Since browsers on content network sites aren’t actively looking to make a purchase, you need to grab their attention. Use phrases like: buy, find, learn more, save now, limited time offer, etc.

Once you get your feet wet, consider advanced features like image and video ads. Target individual sites and maximize your exposure on them. Google, Yahoo! and MSN have been investing in their content networks to create a better advertiser experience and the results have been impressive. With so many tools at your disposal, isn’t it time you gave the content network a try?

By Jean Lloyd
jeanl@ebizinsider.com

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