What is Google’s Content Network?

March 1st, 2007 Jackie

I get this question a lot and so I decided to blog it. After all, my clients can’t be the only ones who are wondering.

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The content network is part of Google’s network of sites that display Google ads unrelated to keywords. The ads show up beside content that is contextually relevant to the keywords you’re bidding on. You can enable content-targeting at the campaign level (as opposed to the Ad Group level) and you still pay per click. There are often many more impressions (times your ads show up) when you implement content-targeting, but the clickthrough rates are usually much lower because it’s a more passive type of advertising than keyword search.  Here is a link to Google’s help page which summarizes the content network and gives examples of some of the sites that are displaying Google ads:

https://adwords.google.com/select/afc.html

And here is an example of a Web page that is displaying Google ads (note the ads at the left of the page beneath the link that says “Ads by Google”):

http://www.wikipregnancy.com

Yahoo and MSN both offer versions of content-targeting, but Google’s network seems to be the most comprehensive. It’s important to test the performance of content-targeted ads because some categories can literally rack up millions of impressions in mere weeks, which translate into thousands or tens of thousands of clicks and can become very expensive. These ads generally don’t convert as well as keyword ads, so if you’re managing a campaign to a specific ROI goal or CPA, content-targeting may blow your performance out of the water (in a bad way).

Entry Filed under: E-Marketing Advice