Comments on: Filling An Ad Spot With Placement Targeting On Google

By: Keith James Lock

Keith James Lock — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:26:34 +0000

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.

By: Stan

Stan — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:58:56 +0000

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?

By: Keith James Lock

Keith James Lock — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 02:17:23 +0000

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.

By: Keith James Lock

Keith James Lock — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 02:15:58 +0000

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.

By: Stan

Stan — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 02:02:40 +0000

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.