Google Content Network

Google announced that as of yesterday, interest categories are now available to all AdWords advertisers. Interest categories are a good way of exposing your content campaigns to more users within the display network. We always recommend that client set up a re-marketing in order to get more data and understand the creative performance

How interest categories work? According to Google “the system looks at the types of pages a user visits, taking into account how recently and frequently those pages have been visited, and then associates their browser with relevant interest categories. Using these categories, you can show ads to the people most likely to purchase your products or services, and you can reach them across all types of sites in the Google Display Network in addition to contextually relevant sites.”

There are over 1,000 interest categories from very niche to very broad interests/themes.  Once more Google is helping advertisers to use the Google Display Network.

Google last week introduced the addition of some new tools and metrics for the Display network. By far our favourite is the Content Ads Diagnostic Tool (CADT).  One of the most frustrating things running a display advertising on Google was the fact that you didn’t know if your ads appeared on a site. As a result you had to wait for some data to come back and then optimise the account. For example now with the Content Ads Diagnostic Tool you can see that your placement-targeted ad groups are not running because they lost the auction or that they are running fine.

The next metric introduced is the Impression Share (IS) which represents the percentage of times that your ads were shown out of the total available impressions for which your ads were eligible to appear on the Google Display Network. Again very good addition as it can help advertisers to add more budget if they feel there is more space.

The last addition is the Relative CTR, Relative CTR shows you how your ads perform relative to other competitors ads running in the same website  on the GDN. A great way to benchmark your performance across the Display Network. How do they calculate that? If your display ads have a CTR of 0.08%, while other ads in the same places on the GDN have a CTR of 0.04%, your Relative CTR is (0.08)/(0.04) = 2x.

Overall the new additions offer more transparency that can help advertisers understand more on the GDN and help them to optimise the placements better. Google the last few years is actively pushing Display but so far it was in some case like a black box. Not its very clear and give us a lot more options.

Search and Display network (or Content network) are two different  …. but sometimes advertisers confuse them. The graph below separates the two and explains the different mindset of the users.

It’s very important to remember that when a user is searching on Google he/she is  proactively looking for a service or products. On the other hand when a user sees a banner or an ad when visiting a website they are not looking for ads. (This explains the low CTR on the display network). In the next few days we will post a few interesting articles on the Google content network explaining in more detail how it works.

What is the Google content network?

The Google content network reaches 80% of global internet users — making it the world’s #1 ad network. Thousands of advertisers use Google to reach users on hundreds of thousands of web sites across all industries, from large, well-known sites to niche sites and audiences. With an audience larger than any other ad network or single web property (even Google.com), on the Google content network your message will reach more of your target audience, in more places, more often.

The content network is a great tool and if used properly could generate some great results. Nowadays Adwords is very transparent on the network and the sites your ads are appearing. For the first few years there was a misconception among advertisers that content network could harm your campaigns because of the high number of impressions. This is definitely not true, there is a higher number of impressions but this is normal.

We always recommend to set up separate campaigns for you content campaigns and with very close theme adgroups. Also its advisable to run separate campaigns for image ads and text ads. This will make it easier to manage the banner ads, and the budget.

When to use content network?

1. Create awareness, of a collection/model/new website
2. Special offers, used with codes/fathers day/Christmas
3. Competition, trying to get users to sign up to your competition etc.
4. New products launch, great for start ups/new products in the marker

A few useful things

The content network offers  three ad formats, Text Ads/Video Ads/Image ads.

For image ads Google accepts eight different sizes, you can see them all here.

The following are the most popular sizes:

Leaderboard (728 x 90)

Banner (468 x 60)

Skyscraper (120 x 600)

Animated Image Ads

Animated ads in .gif and Flash format are accepted but remember they need to be 50k or under and stop any animation after 30 seconds.

Design

1. Add call to actions on the banners, such as shop now/sign up
2. Add your unique selling points
3. Don’t forget to mention special offers
4. Add any media mentions/quotes/reviews

Other solutions

If you don’t have the resources or the creativity to create image ads Google has a tool called Display Ad builder. You can create banners within minutes using some template or by uploading your images.