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The Google Content Network
12/21/2008
After using the Google Content Network in AdWords for a multitude of different customers, I don’t think it is the right solution for the majority of advertisers. There are some who support the content network, and the use of placement reports to filter out bad sites. The problem is if you ever ran a placement report, you would see just how atrocious most of the content network is.
Back when I worked on a Fortune 500 telecommunications device provider account, I would sift through the placement reports to see how things were going in the Content Network (usually, it was not going well). One tidbit I love about the content network, that even its proponents acknowledge, is the black box that is MySpace. Millions of impressions, hundreds, maybe thousands of clicks, and no results. I tried myself numerous times to get my ads to show up on MySpace, but alas, I could not. Who knows if the ads were really running or not. But I digress.
One of my favorite MFA (Made For Adsense) websites was iPhone Solitaire. This site was supposedly set up for someone to play solitaire on their iPhone, and this beautiful MFA site is still hosted to this day. We would get a ridiculous amount of clicks from this site, amounts that would usually correspond to the number of impressions. Genius. Almost a year later, the sleuths at Google still have not figured this one out.
The bulk of traffic that you can see on the content placement report is pure, irrelevant garbage. There are exceptions to the rule, however, where content can be made to work. In certain verticals, for certain tasks, there are times when the Content Network might result in incremental leads. These results usually come from articles on reputable news sites where your content ads are displayed. But the trouble with the Content Network is they do not have a checkbox for “reputable sites only.” It’s all or nothing. Site targeting the New York Times probably isn’t going to be a great solution for most advertisers, even though they get quality results when related articles display on NYT. To Google’s credit, however, at least you can see what is going on. Who knows what kind of shenanigans are going on with Yahoo content placements.
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