MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

If you have not started to drill into your Google con­tent ads, now is the time.  Why?  Because if you are buy­ing ads on Google’s con­tent net­work, then I can pretty much assure you that you are burn­ing a hole in your pocket if you have not started to use Google’s Place­ment Report to iden­tify top and low per­form­ing websites.

What is the Google Place­ment Report?

• The Google Place­ment Reports lets you see the clicks that you are pay­ing for from each of the Google AdSense part­ner sites.

Why is it critical?

• Some of the sites where Google’s AdSense ads appear will be con­vert­ing well for you while oth­ers might not be con­vert­ing well at all.

Let me share some fas­ci­nat­ing sta­tis­tics with you.  To adver­tise our Chain Reac­tion Mar­ket­ing course, we use Google AdWords exten­sively, includ­ing Google con­tent ads.  Of the top 5 con­tent part­ners that our ads appeared on, 3 are non-performers.  Whether they are spam depends on the eye of the beholder but the point is, they are clearly not per­formig and not max­i­mize our ROI we have to exclude them right away. 

For Google’s con­tent ads we are will­ing to spend about $2–4 per sign-up and here is the cost per sign-up of the top 5 content partners.

1. xp.com — $48.62 (Ter­ri­ble ROI)
2. Flightlevel350 — $20.01 (Ter­ri­ble ROI)
3. Domain ads — $3.81
4. Flixxy.com — $18.87 (Ter­ri­ble ROI)
5. Googlerankings.com — $0.65

The top 5 domains accounted for almost 30% of all clicks comig from Google’s con­tent ads and the major­ity of these clicks came from ques­tion­able sites that failed to deliver.  At the aggre­gate level things might have looked ok (the aver­age cost per con­ver­sion was $2.42) but some of the top domains are so bad that they are just burn­ing through money. 

So, by quickly run­ning a Place­ment Report and check­ing the con­ver­sion rate of the top domains we were able to sig­nif­i­cantly boost our ROI and cut our cost per con­ver­sion by 20%.  Plus, the best part of it all is that all of this just took 10 minutes.

Here are the step by step instruc­tions again on how to use Google’s Place­ment Report and Google Site Exclusion:

1) Click on “Reports” in Google AdWords
2) Click on “Place­ment Reports” as the report type
3) Ana­lyze the report in Excel (sim­ply sort by clicks to see the top 5 per­form­ing domains)
4) Check the cost per con­ver­sion by domain and iden­tify the non-performers(NOTE: You must have con­ver­sion track­ing enabled, if you do not, do this right away because you are just wast­ing money if you do not do this)
5) Click on your cam­paigns in Google AdWords and right below “edit cam­paign set­tings” you will see a link that says:  No excluded sites: add
6) Click on add and add the domains you want to exclude

Want to learn more on how to boost your Google AdWords performance?

Check out AdWords Sys­tem Exposed

Learn to make money with pay per click

Last 5 posts by

• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
• Google Slap — How to recover from a Google Slap? — Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2008
• What Does Your Order But­ton Say? — August 29th, 2008
• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analy­sis Indicates…It Just Might — July 23rd, 2008
• Are small busi­nesses drop­ping out of AdWords? — July 23rd, 2008

About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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