Site Targeting & Site Placement
Site targeting is a hidden gem within the Google AdWords set up and something that very few people use or even know about how to use. This is what we are going to discuss in this chapter as well as a few tips and tricks on getting it to work for you. Site targeting is basically a sniper use of the content network. Instead of entering keywords and letting the system decide which sites to run your ads on, you just enter the URL's and pages that you want to run on. So nothing is left to chance. One of the keys to this model is, because of recent changes, you can now bid either in a traditional CPC way, or you can use the old fashioned method of CPM, or cost per thousand impressions. Now, many people online will tell you that CPM is bad, doesn't give you a good ROI and will lose you money.
But this is simply not true. Now, if you feel more comfortable bidding CPC, then by all means go with that. Bid a little higher than you would on content because, firstly, you know you are getting highly targeted traffic, and secondly you will very rarely be charged your max CPC. But, if you are running a campaign that has a CTR of 1% or higher then it may well be prudent to look towards a CPM campaign. That is, it may well be possible to get your ad running for $0.50 CPM and if you are getting a 2-3% CTR. Then you are looking at between 20 and 30 clicks for $0.50. This is the secret that people are referring to when you occasionally hear that it is possible to get less than $0.01 clicks on AdWords these days. This is a statement that is designed to create hype and controversy, but it is entirely true. It's no secret, though; the key is a high CTR and low CPM bidding.
Another reason that the site-targeting method is great is that you do not have to worry about quality score. That's pretty awesome if you have spent a long time working out ways to be considered good enough to give Google your money, as I have. Your sites will be reviewed and it is a manual review process so it can take up to around 3 days for the ads to be approved to run but this is not for quality score reasons. This is because they want to make sure that the ad conforms to the other rules (no pop-ups, hate speech etc.) and also that you are not saying anything that may affect the business or reputation of the site you are advertising on. To stick with the Blockbuster examples from the previous PPC manuals, if they ran AdSense on their site (which they don't) then we could bid there and write an ad about how Blockbuster sucks and Netflix is great. This would generally piss off Blockbuster and mean they would probably remove the AdSense from their site. This is exactly what Google doesn't want to have happen and the reason they require manual review. (Don't worry though, once you spend enough per month they give you your own rep so you can get them to approve it faster).
What you can also use to your benefit though is the ability to run banner ads. We will discuss this in the banner ad okay but it does merit a mention that some of the larger AdSense boxes, can at times, be filled entirely with your ad - Either a huge version of your text ad or a graphical ad. People also condemn banner ads without having actually tested them ever themselves, but we will see that they can be hugely profitable in the banner ad section of the learning area.
