Posted on May 2, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Many Google Adwords advertisers have improved their Adwords ROI using Google’s Display Network because it allows them to extend their advertising reach and target prospects on contextually relevant websites that display Google ads. However, the contextual targeting has always been far from perfect and advertisers are often shocked to discover their ads appearing on non-contextually related web pages, parked domains and low quality sites. By “low quality sites” we mean MFA or Made-For-AdSense sites where the sole purpose is for the website owner to get a portion of the cost per click the Google advertiser pays. The more clicks, the more money they make. As you can imagine, the quality of traffic from sites like this is poor.
On the other hand, if a Display Network campaign is setup properly and with on-going optimization and vigilant blocking of poor quality sites, it can be quite profitable for the advertiser. Some of our clients have received more leads, at a lower cost per lead, from the Display Network than from Search.
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Posted on February 24, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Parked domain?
People who place ads though AdWords or Microsoft adCenter typically do so primarily because they want the chance to bring someone who has typed a relevant search query into Google, Yahoo or Bing to their website. What is not so well known is that roughly half of the money that is spent on AdWords or adCenter goes for clicks on ads that do not appear on search results pages, but instead appear on other websites.
AdWords and adCenter show ads on these non-search websites by default unless this feature is manually disabled. This approach, known as Contextual PPC, provides many more opportunities for ads to be seen and clicked than if they just appeared on search results pages, so it drives substantial revenue for Google and Microsoft, gives advertisers greater exposure, and helps website publishers monetize their content.
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Posted on December 16, 2010 by Hans Riemer
Are you trapped?
Recently we were called in to investigate a PPC account that had been migrated from Yahoo
Search Marketing to Microsoft adCenter. Since moving to adCenter, the account experienced a significant drop in ROI. They were still getting plenty of clicks but those clicks weren’t converting, which was badly hammering their cost-per-acquisition.
The company sells Christmas decorations from their website. They have an excellent web analytics tool that can track individual incoming visitors (which Google Analytics does not do) so it didn’t take us long to spot quite a number of paid clicks that spent almost no time on the site. We looked at the referring URLs to see where the ads were appearing that sent these visitors and discovered something very interesting about Microsoft adCenter PPC that’s potentially costing advertisers some real money.
In a moment, we’re going to explain what is occurring and tell you how to fix it if it is happening to you. This affects advertisers using adCenter as well as those who previously used Yahoo Search Marketing, because YSM is now managed through adCenter.
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