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

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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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