Make Money With Adwords Cheap Content Network Ads
Posted on: May 25, 2008
Posted in: Search Engine Marketing
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If you want to make money with Adwords, you will need to keep up to date with the new strategies that are constantly appearing, as well as keeping pace with the changes that Google makes to its Adwords policies.
In 2007 it was ‘kill your competitors’ with Day Job Killer and then the many and varied spy systems that tracked your competitors’ ads so that you could copy them and blast them out of the water. Some of these systems were on a hugely expensive membership plan.
Almost at once, people who could not afford the Adwords spy systems or were tired of the constant fighting for search engine placement began looking around for new ideas. Early in 2008 we saw the first signs of what they had found. In fact it was not new, but a rediscovery of something that had been considered dead – the Adsense content network.
If you have come to Adwords in the last couple of years, you may not know that the search and content networks were once united. Google separated them to give advertisers more control in the days when click fraud was common. Most advertisers immediately (and rightly) turned off the content network for their ads.
However, times have changed. Click fraud is nothing like as common as it was, thanks to Google’s very heavyhanded measures in closing the accounts of any Adsense user who has any strange clicking activity on their site. This is a big problem for Adsense site owners because it means that any bored kid anywhere in the world can put them out of business by repeatedly clicking on their ads. But for Adwords advertisers, it means that the content network has opened up again.
Advantages of advertising on the content network instead of the search network include a cheaper cost per click, and a lot more control. You can actually pick the exact sites that you want your ad to appear on.
The last point there is very important. When setting up a campaign for the content network, always specify target sites for your ads. In fact, you should specify not only the site, but the exact pages of the site.
Just like advertising on the search network, you want to make sure that the people who see your ad are very interested in your product. You don’t want untargeted clicks. So for example if you are promoting an exercise treadmill, you want your ad on a fitness site, but not on pages about weight training.
It is also recommended that you only advertise on sites that have their Adsense ‘above the fold’ – i.e. the ads are visible on screen immediately when the page is opened, without scrolling down. If they are in the ‘hot’ area toward the top left of the screen, that’s even better.