This will be a short but powerful post. Remember the Google Placement Performance reports I mentioned in my last post? Placement reports tell you what sites your Content Network ads are appearing on.
We’ll here’s what you need to do:
- Export the Placement Performance Report to an Excel File, make sure you do a long enough time period so you get statistically relevant data
- Now sort your results by Cost/Conv.
- Take the sites with the lowest Cost/Conv.-make sure these are super profitable sites-and copy them to a separate Excel worksheet. Again, make sure the Cost/Conv. data is based on at least 200-300 clicks, otherwise it’s NOT statistically relevant.
- Now go to Adwords and start a site-targeted campaign using the high converting domains you found above
- Now put all these domains in one adgroup and write two generic ad going to a generic landing page about your affiliate promotion or even your own product
- Set your CPM at 0.50 to start off
- Now let it run!
- As you get some data, be sure to cut out sites with low CTR (below 0.10%)-since your doing CPM this is actually REALLY important!
- Keep split testing ads, the key metric to monitor is your Cost/Conv.
- You will find sites that have a very low Cost/Conv. with this technique, the trick is to increase your CPM for these sites to 0.75-1.00. Believe it or not you’ll pay the same per click (sometimes less) since your CTR will go up along with your CPM, since you’ll get a bigger ad block on site. That is instead of getting a baby adsense ad you get a monster one that take up 3 spots. IT’S TOTALLY SWEET!
By doing keyword targeting alone you only get a small fraction of the impressions from sites your ads are showing up, site targeting let’s your ads show up throughout these sites.
If you do this right you’ll get a ton additional high converting traffic to your site. Have fun with this!
this is a good tip that works. It’s all about finding ways to get the converting traffic at the cheaper rate
Nice and tricky tip. But I can’ figure out one thing, last one in the post. How is it possible to get a bigger ad block by increasing your CPM. Does it mean that you can show several ads at the same time or one ad would look bigger than others. There is Google rules for the ad size, after all. Could explain this in details?
Hi Phil,
If your CPM is big enough, Google will give you the same one ad except it will be 3 times bigger, taking up a whole ad block.
That was short and powerful…can’t wait to try this.
I just came across your blog and wanted to say that I’ve been looking for info like this. I’ve subscribed to your feed. Awesome stuff here.
Thanks Amit,
I had to read the post three times before I got the whole idea about Performance Placements, yeah I have seen those google ads on some sites now I know.
You are a numbers and tracking guy, I also like to play with numbers and analysis.
No wonder I have you in my most influentials teachers list.
Vijay
Excellent tip Amit. Thanks a lot. I can’t wait to try it out myself. However, I just wanted to ask you one question. What exactly do you mean by long enough on point 1?
I would really like to know what period you consider as long enough to run those tests?
Regards,
Ayush
Hi amit,
Do the site owners have any control over the site-targeted ads that appear on their site?
i think reasonably, it should be so.
esh,
I don’t believe they do… I think they CAN choose to display or not display different types of ads ie; image,text,video,audio but cannot choose what sites (urls) can or cannot advertise on their ad block.
Amit, correct me if i’m wrong here…
Peter