I have been using Adwords for almost a year and I am still unsure about Content Networks within Google Adwords. How do the keywords relate to the content networks? Are they words that are found on the other persons site? Is this what triggers the advert? How targeted should the content ads and keywords be? Thanks
Ads are generated contextually or through placement targeting. In other words, Google serves ads that go with the content of the webpage or they can serve ads on specific locations you target. I typically write specific ads for specific keywords. You don't have to be as specific as me, but it can help if you are in a crowded market.
To add and clarify, and using Google's terms, a theme is determined from your keywords. A theme(s) is also determined for each page on the content network. Google simply then finds pages that matches your theme. It does not, as some would believe, check your keywords for their presence on pages in the network. That would require way too much computing power. Your keywords for the CN have to be super related for it to work best. And you don't need much, 5 to 20 according to Google to determine your theme. Not enough and it may not be able to determine your theme. Too many and you're just confusing the system and your ads may not show at all or not be targeted as well. Best to use placement targeting. Oh, and as been said many times before, don't mix content and search campaigns together. Main reason is who and how you are advertising. They are different so your ads must be different. A heading of "Acne Cream" which may be your keyword may work very well in search but not at all in content where "Your Acne Gone in 7 Days" may be more appropriate.
Basically is just a google that spiders your content and look for specific keywords on the site. Google will try to put the best matching adds to the content that you have on the page. How targeted? the more targeted the better. The best way I have found the use of Content Network as is using specifically with webpages. Like this site for example. I will just bit to appear on the ads of this site instead of bidding on a single keyword.
You have to watch the content network though. We've seen problems with repeated click fraud for foreign IPs, though we're hoping Google's on top of it. Make sure to see what websites are running your 'content' ads to see if that's really where you want customers coming from.
As Google has said: That means that your ad contextual network will lie upon how Google targets the relevance of your keywords on news, blogs, pages, etc so Google matches your keywords' capability to be placed onto these related networks. Thus, the more targeted your keywords are, the more it will be seen on the whole content networks. You can see more here: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=91765