Ruck over at CashTactics.net wrote a great post today about Placement Targeting on Google. The post is part of his CPA Marketing Series that I told you about at the beginning of March. Here is Ruck's post: CPA Marketing Series - Page Sniping Google Placements
He talks about testing out different ways of taking over an entire ad placement on a page, for less immediate competition I assume. The majority of the money that I've earned online to date is with Placement Targeting on Google using images ads and taking over the entire ad spot.
I go the CPM (Cost Per Impression) route mostly and have had a lot of success with it. I have never used tools to find the sites that I place my ads on, I manually search for them. Actually, I do run a quick search through Google's tool afterwards to see if there is anymore that I can add. I search for sites related to my niche by using general keywords and also search with the keywords that I use in my search campaigns.
I promote a product that is a companion product to something else. A lot of times, the people who own the product don't know that my product exists. (which is why I believe it is successful). Like I said, I seek out high traffic sites that promote the main product and place my ads there. I only place ads above the fold and I use graphical ads.
Some sites don't allow graphical ads but a lot do. The ads I create aren't traditional banner looking ads either, they haven't worked for me. The ads I create are ugly. They are black arial text on a white background with no border.
I make ads that correspond to the ad size on the page. If you are unable to eye ball the size (you will eventually) then just look at the source code for the dimensions. When you are ready to create your ad, don't make them the exact size because your text will look distorted after Google resizes it putting its' brand on it. Follow the table below for creating your images.
The first dimension represents the end result, the size that Google ends up creating which is the size the dimension will be in the source code. The second dimension is the size that you should make the graphic that you upload to Google.
468x60 - 468x49
250x250 - 250x239
200x200 - 200x200
728x90 - 728x79
300x250 - 300x239
336x280 - 336x269
120x600 - 120x578
160x600 - 160x578
Good luck, let me know how it goes.
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April 2nd, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Hey Keith,
Nice tip on the banner ad sizes. I always wondered why my ads looked distorted!
I’ve had some success with placement targeting but lately Adwords is being annoying. Have you had any similar experiences as the ones below?
I ran a placement add that averaged about .90 CPM but I only was getting a 30% ROI. So I paused it for a week. I resumed it without changing anything and I got no impressions. Then raised the max bid to $10 CPM and still no luck. Called adwords to make sure my campaign and adds were active and they said they were fine. So I raised the bid to $30 CPM just to see if I could get any impressions. Still 0 impressions, and I know the advertisers I’m competing with are not paying such a huge CPM when I was able to get it for .90 CPM just a few weeks ago.
Called adwords and they said there are a bunch of factors that go into if your Placement Ads will show, but I would think its just like regular search…as long as you big $5/$10 a click they will show them. Have you had problems where you just can’t get impressions, no matter how how you bid?
Also do you use the Adwords MCC account setup when doing Placement targeting? I’ve yet to setup the MCC.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Yeah, happened a couple times. When you use image ads they need to verify the ad (which makes sense)…but after they are running, if you pause them, run out of adspend, anything, they have to be re-verified. It took 3 people at Google to finally tell me that. It took approximately 1 week for my ads to start running again.
I find when an ad is first created with images it runs quickly, practically right away, but like I said, pause it and it takes them up to week (in my case) to get back to verifying it. So now once my ad is running and it is successful I do everything I can to keep it running.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:17 pm
oh yeah…and the worse part is, there is no indication in your ad group that the ad is “pending verification”. I submitted feedback to tell them but I’m sure it fell on deaf ears.
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:58 am
Gotcha. I agree, its so bad there is no way to know if your ad is live. They shouldn’t put active next to it, until they have verified it.
Does having an MCC account (Ruck talked about it helping in search if you get a bad quality score, you just run the campaign on a sub account, since all the sub accounts get their own account history) help with Placement ads?
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:26 am
I actually have never used an MCC account. I have never taken account history into question for Quality Score. I’ve been developing sites for a long time (way before I was doing affiliate marketing) and try to apply SEO all the time. My landing pages are always pages of an entire site. I develop the sites first, SEO as much as I am capable, drive traffic from popular sites, then I run PPC. So, in general my QS is good. If account history plays a role then it makes sense that an MCC account could help. I don’t concern myself with it though. It’s not concrete enough for me to make any decisions on. Maybe one day…
Thanks for the comments Stan.