I was looking into promoting my website http://www.free-webmaster-resource.com via google adWords, but i very soon found out i could never out-bid some of the competition in my area. I entered a big list of words and none em them came cheap, rather extremely expensive. I kept 1 or 2 keywords running but never thought about the fact i also kept my ads running in the content network google offers. Suddenly i saw a very big increase in people that found my site and i noticed in my stats its all because of those those google content ads. I also noticed the traffic came very cheaply and seemed to be a valuable audience that was generally interested in what i have to offer. Not all of them but a large part of visitors via those links also stayed quite a while So i know its not always good to have the content network selected, but in my case i have to say it really works out well. Just happy to tell this hehe
I always allow content ads but my max price is set to at least 50% less than my search engine results since I think there is a lot more abuse with these results. I would never pay very much for content ads but I must say that myb keywords show up a several sites where I'm very glad to pay the price and then they also show up at obscure webpages which I know does not earn me anything... then it' s time to block
You are correct, i do that too. I am not going to pay a lot for those clicks because of the possible abuse etc.. I keep my eye on it all the time to see how its going.
Check the conversion of content to search network ads. Also watch out for click fraud. From my experience its more prevalent with content ads.
That depens on who you're targeting and what your daily budget is. I adjust my CPC max once a day to be sure I pay the minimum. Having a lot of visitors is fine but what about the conversion rate? If a large part is not bounced, that's fine but also check your returning rate.
Indeed i check for that a lot too. Its a bit of a balance between people that click ads in my site(s) and people that return. I notice a lot of return visitors, but the money i earn back via ads isnt no where near to be high enough. Im still liking the content network a lot, but i do have to admit that im paying to make my site a bit more known and hope people return, it isnt making me money at all but at them moment its worth it to me.
Choose carefully your medium, prices are between $0.01 and $0.20 if you target webmasters. And that make a huge difference (I spend about $5 a day in advertising). Paying more than $0.05 is (probably) a waste of money for a free site.
Bidding on the content network can bring great results depending on your goal. The important thing is to use a third party tracker that will also give you the ability to track the IP address of people who click on your ad. This lets you check for click fraud as someone else mentioned in this thread. If you track your conversions daily, you can also filter out certain sites and see how it changes your conversions to help you decide which sites are worth advertising on. The key is tracking and measuring results.