PPC Profits: Search Network, or Content Network?

Search Network, and Content Network, are two completely different worlds, but both of them can bring huge PPC profits, if done correctly. When creating your PPC campaigns, you need to choose where to put your adverts on. You might want to have your ads on the paid search results (that`s on the right sidebar of the search window) so you would advertise on the Search Network, or on many different websites, where website owners have small blocks of text ads on their pages - which would be advertising on the Content Network.

Increasing Your PPC Profits: The PROS and CONS of advertising on the Search Network, and the Content Network

I`ll cover the most important parts of advertising on both of these networks in just a minute, but before we go further, there`s something you should know about the two.

There is a HUGE difference between advertising on the Search Network, and the Content Network. Both methods are completely different, and before even starting your campaigns, the first thing you should do, is NOT mix them together. That means, on your campaign settings, you should choose either the advertising on the Search Network, or the Content Network. That`s most important for Google Adwords advertising, as they have the Quality Score system, which is so smart, you need to think about what you`re doing every step of the way.

Here is how it works:

On Google, your CTR (click through rate) affects your clicks price. That is - if you have some ads running, and they get no clicks, that means for Google, that people are not interested in what you have to offer. And as Google focuses on their customers and only wants to show them the ads that DO get the attention and clicks, they will let those ads that get high CTR appear easier than those that do not get high CTR. And one of the ways to do that, is to set the price high for those advertisements that do not get the desired attention - so advertisers do not run those ads, or if they do, Google makes even more money.

Increasing PPC Profits: Advertising on The Search Network

This is probably the most popular way to get your ads out there. You set your ads, choose your keywords, and let them run. These are the aspects of advertising on the Search network:

1) You have to bid on keywords, and the more targeted they are, the better results you will get. Many marketers bid on the “Phrase” or even “Exact” type of keywords, as they know these do bring most targeted visitors to their websites.

2) The more you pay, the higher your ads will appear on the paid search results.

3) The tighter your ad groups, the higher your CTR will be, and the less you will pay. For example: if you are advertising a Canon Digital SLR Camera #123, you might want to have one ad group for the keywords “Digital SLR #123″, “SLR Digital #123″ on one ad group, and keywords “Canon Digital #123″, “Canon #123″ on another one. And so on. You will have the same keyword variations in the title and the text of your ad. Very tight ad groups do bring great results.

4) You will need to set the max bids for your keywords. One of the mistakes many advertisers do, is they look at what Google (or Yahoo, or any other) suggests, and bid that high. This is NOT the best thing to do. From our experience, you still get many, many impressions and clicks if you bid lower than the suggested bid. Just think about it - why shouldn`t they tell you how much they want to get from you? Of course they do tell - and many advertisers just say “ok”, bid on that, and just give the money away. Once again - you can have EXACTLY the same results bidding way less than Google, or Yahoo, or any other, suggest.

Increasing PPC Profits: Advertising on The Content Network

As said before, this is a completely different thing from the Search Network advertising.

These ads are shown on millions of websites, instead of the paid search results. Remember seeing “ads by Google”, or “ads by Yahoo” on many of the websites? This is where the ads show when you put them on the Content Network.

Now, the things you need to know about advertising on the Content Network, are:

1) When starting, you have to bid LOW, really low. Way lower than on the Search Network. Because your ads can get thousands of clicks per day, and get you out of budget really soon. We usually start our campaigns on the Content Network for as low as $0.01 per click! If we see no results in a day or so, we increase the bids. And it is really rare to pay more than $0.10 per click on the Content Network.

2) You will get LOW CTR when running your ads on the Content Network. And this is because various websites are getting many, many pageviews daily, but just a few people click on the ads. And this is NORMAL. The CTR on the Content Network does not affect the ad performance as much as on the Search Network.

3) You don`t have to bid on exact keywords, when advertising on the Content Network. Instead, you have to adjust a THEME to what you want to advertise, and bid on those keywords. And the broader they are, the better.

Example:

If you want to promote a weight loss product, think about WHO you are promoting to, and what those people are also interested in. Many times, women will be interested in your offer, so they are interested in many more topics such as: dresses, swimwear, looking good, getting into relationship, and many more.

Now, here is how you make this work for your advertising. you build your ads around those topics. For example, your ad might look like this:

Lose Pounds, Fit In Dress

Need to Lose Weight and Fit In That

Dress? Try This Powerful Diet!

http://www.yourlink.com

And you bid on broad keywords dress, dresses, dress size. And that`s it! This will show the system what themes of the websites are good for your ad, so the website about the dresses can run your ad. And it WILL get clicked, because women are interested in losing weight, as they want to look good in their dress!

4) One more thing to keep in mind. Ads might take some time to start running on the Content Network. It might take even one day to start seeing impressions. Same thing to stopping your ads - when you stop them, they might keep running for some time, costing you money.

This is why I suggest to have a daily budget set, so the ads stop running when you reach it.

So, to make good PPC profits, separating your Content Network and Search Network campaigns should be the very first step.