How To Use Google’s Placement Targeting
Written by ady on February 27, 2009 – 6:40 pm -My email bag was full this morning of questions about Google’s Placement Targeting after yesterdays giveaway of the excellent Adwords Digger tool (still available for free download here if you missed it yesterday).
I know from experience that when you first start using Google’s Placement Targeting, the huge selection of websites out there for you to place your Adwords ads on can be quite intimidating so lets look at how you pick the Adsense publishers that will drive traffic to your offer out of the many thousands that you can choose from. More importantly perhaps, lets see how you can do it for the lowest price possible.
Google’s placement targeting works exactly the same way as Google Adwords but without the need for keywords. Normally you would decide which of the search results you wanted your ads to appear on by targeting specific keyword sets but with placement targeting you select websites that are carrying Adsense ads to show your ads. So instead of hoping your target audience searches for the keywords you have used and then sees and clicks on your ad, you find the sites they visit and put your ad on there for them to see.
Anyone with a standard Adwords account can use placement targeting. You can simply add placements to an existing campaign you are running; simply click on the ‘Placements’ tab on the main page of your ad group. There are four ways to identify placements: ‘list URLs’, ‘describe topics’, ‘browse topics’, and ’select demographics’.
You can use all 4 options when deciding where to put your placements. With each search, up to 100 available placements will be listed, with the approximate number of impressions per day listed. You can also refine your search by the type of ad you want to run by clicking on ‘Choose Formats’. Select the formats and sizes that you want to use, and Google will refine the list to show only the sites with the selected formats available.
All of that takes time which is where the free Adwords Digger comes into its own. Adwords Digger will find you sites that are showing up in the top 10 rankings of Google for specific ‘high traffic’ keywords. This allows you to be sure that your ads are being seen by targeted prospects and are on sites that you know get plenty of traffic.
Once you have your list of sites you then simply copy and paste the urls into your AdWords campaign and you are off to the races! - low cost and extremely targeted ads.
Once you have your campaigns running you can monitor the click thru rates carefully and any that are doing well (remember, these are highly targeted sites) you can change from CPC to CPM. This means you pay for a block of 1000 impressions rather than pay per click.
The theory behind this is that if you’ve carefully targeted the websites your ads are going to appear on, then your click-through rates are going to be much higher than the average, making the CPM option (with lower costs because there are no guaranteed click-throughs) better for your campaign.
It is important to remember that you will need to constantly analyze the results of your campaign to ensure that your CPM costs are, in fact, saving you money versus CPC. If sites are not performing within the standards you’ve set for the campaign, remove them; likewise, if a particular site is giving you a great click-through-rate, invest more impressions in that site.
Google’s placement targeting is a great option for anyone like me who used to do well at Adwords but got driven out by continually increasing costs of keywords or for someone new to Adwords without the budget to compete in the search results.
Tags: adwords digger
Posted in Adwords |
