Forget the mundane Q2 earnings at Google. The search advertising company today unveiled a first of its kind AdWords campaign type for all of their advertisers, one that places keyword and placement targeting in one interface across the globe that should make their advertising even more valuable.
The Google AdWords Blog today announced that AdWords advertisers can now consolidate keyword and placement targeted campaigns in the same ad group. The goal is to combine what had been separate campaign types: keyword-targeted and placement-targeted advertising campaigns.
Simply put, it is to improve targeting on the Google’s network. When you choose keywords in your ad groups to contextually target your ads, and simultaneously the ability to use placements to set specific bids or restrict your targeting to specific sites on the Google content network. Earlier it was not possible to manage your campaign this way.
This new feature simply brings parallel worlds within the AdWords platform together. Google also explains that, “by adding placements to keyword-targeted campaigns, advertisers can now set unique bids for specific sites in the content network.”
The ability to control advertisements through both processes has been available for a long time. One could choose keywords across the network, or look for discrete vertical audiences with certain site placements. Google did the two-great-tastes that taste-great-together move in putting the two together.
However, have you ever wished to bid more (or less) for a specific content network site you are contextually targeting?
Google offers two ways through which you might want to use these new content network features:
Set custom bids for specific placements: Let us assume that you are selling laptops, and you are using the content network to advertise on pages relevant to the keywords “laptops,” “laptop computers,” and “laptop accessories.” After checking your Placement Performance report, you see that you are getting sales at a great ROI from three technology review sites. You also see a few sites where you are getting sales, but your costs are too high to advertise effectively on them.
So presently, if you have made a $1.00 bid for the content network as a whole in this ad group, you can still add the high- and low-performing sites as placements into your ad group with custom bids. For example, you might set a $2.00 Max CPC for the three high-performing sites, and a $0.50 Max CPC for the low-performing ones. Meanwhile, you are still using the keywords in your ad group to target relevant pages across the content network, but now you have adjusting bids for the sites in the network that perform better or worse than average.
Display your ad only when keywords and placements match together. For instance, you check your Placement Performance details again and notice that your laptop ads are displayed often on sites that discuss how to make laptops more energy efficient. You know that you sell some of the most energy efficient laptops available, and you would like to write an ad that highlights the power-saving benefits of your products. But you do not want to show this ad on pages whose readers are not as concerned about energy conservation.
Now you can develop an ad group containing the same “laptop” keywords you used earlier and simply add each of the energy efficiency sites as placements, and change your ad management settings so that your ads are displayed only on the sites you have added, and only when their pages are relevant to your keywords. This provides you the autonomy to write an ad highlighting the energy-saving benefits of your laptops to this unique audience, since you know that your ad will appear only on relevant pages on the placements you have selected.
Thus, in all, an evolutionary measure, to be sure. Certainly, AdWords is the king of the web forest, so regardless of this whether this option has many takers or not, it surely will be flying high. But from advertisers’ viewpoint, the establishment of this bridge may add an extra sheen to their campaigns.
To discover more pros and cons of the feature and get started, please check out the Google help document.