Giving up on Content Network

I have been trying adwords for a couple of years now for a B2B site.

I have only just got around to looking at the performance of the Content network v the Search network in analytics. I run seperate campaigns for both.

Interesting that the content network gets loads more impressions and loads more clicks (thought the CTR is very poor) and at a much lower CPC.

But when I look at the analytics, my natural search (Google Organic) results are far better than the paid ads (Google cpc) results. That is in terms of time on page, number of pages viewed, bounce rate etc.

Then when I dig deeper and compare the Google Serach v Content network results. The content targetting is much worse in terms of bounce rate, pages viewed etc.

This would seem to indicate that:

Customers coming via natural serach are the best for me.
Google search ads perform better than content, perhaps because the person is actually performing a search, rather than just browsing a vaguely relevant website.
Google Content ads perform worst, perhaps becuase they are poorly targetted. (I don't target specific urls currently)

I guess the other factor in all this, is the quality of the ads. If they were better, ie better matching the services and web page content, the bounce rate would be lower. But I think they are fairly OK.

Anyone have similar experiences? What sort of bounce rates are you getting from Google Ads? I seem to run between 50-80% for search ads and 80%+ for content ads.

My organic traffic bounces at about 70% average. (ranges a lot across the site of course)

 

In my view you need to look at creating separate content campaigns with highly knitted keywords. Content network works for me brilliantly. In some cases ROI from content campaigns are better than search campaigns.

The key is to make the right audience look at your ads. If you are able to do this by carefully selecting keywords and ads, it would always result in a good ROI.

 

I do run seperate campaigns, read my post. And I have very tight keywords.