I picked up an interesting paper from John Battelle’s site investigating PPC advertising and CPA (written by Alexandre Douzet of theladders.com).
As far as I know it’s the first published study of the relative performance of Google search ads against Google content network ads.
I’ve always had a natural aversion to advertising on Google’s content network as it requires me to fly our ads completely blindfold. And, although I trust Google sufficiently to assume they will put my ads on pages with at least some degree of keyword relevance, I have recently decided buying ads I can’t even see is too great a leap of faith.
Is it so difficult for Google to give its advertisers some visibility of the sites they are paying to advertise on? Without it, I suspect many happy search advertisers will continue to disable content network.
There are simply too many unknowns:
- do any of these sites undermine my brand?
- is my ad being served on pages written in a negative context?
- do I trust publishers on the network not to be clickfraud perps?
- is my ad copy relevant or optimised?
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