Hi, I setted up a Google Adwords account after first reading a guide from Brad Callen (known Internet Marketeer) so I should know the basics. I did a test with a very specific ad for one product and only used a couple of very specific and not frequently used keywords. I limited my campain settings to Belgium and the Netherlands + only dutch speaking. I chose to show my ads on the Google SE, the whole Google Network and other adsense activated pages. Because I narrowed things down so thoroughly I expected to have few impressions but a high CTR keeping my cost low and only sending high quality visitors to my product page. My campain is running for 12 hours now and the impressions from the searchpages are as expected, only 19 impressions. However the other sources showed my ad 1700+ times! This is impossible for the limits I've setted up so I'm thinking that if you chose to show your ads over the whole network, for the not-G-search-pages, your campain settings are not taken into account. What do you guys think? Thanks! Kris
It'll be impressions on the content network - the adsense ads. They always show a lot of impressions - not always high quality. If you want to use the content network it's best to exclude it from your campaign - then start another campaign with only content ads, so you can monitor, target and control it better. Also run a report to see where the ads are being shown, and if it's not where you want them, exclude those sites. (but content ads don't impact on your search ads quality score - google expect them to get a lower ctr rate, so you don't need to panic if they're not getting as many clicks as your search keywords)
Hi Magda, thanks for the advice. I only received 2 clicks for 1700 impressions. I paied them almost 1€/click ~ 1.4$ which is quite expensive. I expect the CTR to be so low because my ad is in dutch and it's being showed on english websites however I did set my campain setting to dutch speaking visitors only. Good idea about the report! Thanks Kris