I understand that google uses the keywords in your content network adgroups to try determine a theme and auto target relevant sites. However if you turn auto placement off and use manual targeting only, the theming concept is no longer an issue, so why not just throw all your keywords into 1 adgroup? And assuming your keywords are related enough that they can share the same ad copy. Just wondering about this and secondly google does not allow manual targeting on a campaign level so it's a pain in the butt, having to go thru each adgroup 1 by 1 and adding a manual placement targets as I find ones that are converting. Let me know your thoughts.
At this time I am not using the Auto Placement Content Network, oh yes a lot of clicks and NO Sales. Tried the Manual Placement also for awhile but just too much work involed and again NO slaes.
Manual placement (it's actually called Managed placement, used to be called site targeting, the term I prefer) is best in my opinion. The way it works is not using your keywords but you select the sites you want your ads to appear on. Sure, it can be lots of work, but very much worth doing. You should not have keywords in a site targeted campaign or a list of sites in an automatic targeted campaign.
Really? You can do a manual/site targeted CONTENT NETWORK campaign without any keywords? For instance, if I have an ad for gardening products that for some crazy reason I suspect dentists would respond to, I can place that gardening ad on a specific dentistry website without having to create a keyword list?
You can target dentist sites and have an ad about gardening. Just don't use keywords about gardening or dentistry for that matter. The point of site targeting is to target specific sites, ones you want to advertise on (for whatever reason). If you include keywords as well, you could get unexpected results. If you are targeting dentist sites AND using keywords (I assuming you are doing that and using gardening keywords), that won't work. You are not likely to get any impressions. Google will look at the gardening keywords and figure your theme is gardening. It would then say "Um. He wants to target dentist sites only". How many dentist sites are there with a gardening theme? If you are targeting dentist sites, keywords become irrelevant. As I said, you may get unexpected results too.
What if you were to look at the dentistry site you're doing the placement (or whatever site your doing a placement for), find what keywords are prevalent on that site, and manually put together an adgroup with those keywords, and use that?