Recession or not, you want your AdWords budget to work hard for your business so that your Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) is as low as possible. But what happens if you are losing clicks without realising it? You hit maximum budget half way through the day and you have no idea why!
So what’s the problem? It could be a sneaky one, related to an automatic opt-in to Google’s ‘Content Network’.
We’ve noticed that when businesses set up an AdWords account for the first time, many of them do not realise that their ads are appearing on other websites on the Internet, not just on the search engines.
Unless you opt-out of the ‘content network’, which can be found under the Campaign Settings tab in the Network and Devices section, your ads will be displayed under these three categories: ‘Search’, ‘Content’ and ‘Devices’.
- SEARCH is broken down into Google Search and Google’s Search Partners
These are the AdWords ads with which you are familiar on the search engines - CONTENT is Google’s content network, so your search ads are displayed on a range of websites that are a part of this network
- DEVICES are the newest addition and they include desktop and laptop computers, as well as phones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers
This is fantastic from the perspective of reach because your business can broaden its reach to customers via a number of online avenues and not just through the search engine results pages. Only 5% of the Internet is made up of search engines and results pages. The other 95% may contain content that is very relevant to your business.
But there’s a hitch. If you do not realise that you are advertising across all these platforms, you could be losing a large percentage of your daily budget to untargeted clicks. The truth is that if you do not manage the content network, your ads could appear on almost any website that is a part of this network.
A placement campaign on the content network may work brilliantly for your business but this campaign needs to be developed separately to your traditional AdWords search campaign.
Your Google Analytics data is the best place to check if you are losing untargeted clicks to the content network. If you do not know how to check whether you have a leaky bucket in your AdWords budget, give us a shout at October 17 Media. We would be thrilled to help you manage your AdWords campaign!
Interested in getting an Online Marketing Review and Diagnosis? Check out our Usability Review Solution PDF.
Tags: AdWords Campaign Strategy, AdWords Management, Google AdWords
