By Mike Churchill
I noticed something interesting tonight as I went to set up a new PPC campaign in Google AdWords. As I went to opt out of the Content Network, I got the following message:
I am guessing that this means that Google has been having some problems with increased opt-outs from the Content Network, and are taking steps to try to stem the loss. Not a good thing; not a bad thing; just an interesting thing that I thought I would share in case you had not seen it yet.
When I opted out of a campaign Google was working with me on 2w ago, I was pitched heavily on the content networks’ opportunity – with some pretty lame reasoning. Some sites clearly should NOT be on the content network – no matter how “good” it is, while others will get most of their juice from it.
Opting out of CN is one of the first things I do during setup of an Adwords / MSN / Yahoo campaign. I’ll go back in and design campaigns specifically for the CN if it’s warranted, and same goes for site-selection setups. But it’s very carefully done.
I’m a firm believer if your going to run ads on the content network they should always be in their own content network campaign and not mixed in with search ads. Alot of people miss this, because the content network option is turned on by default whenever one sets up a new campaign. Google of course discourages you from opting out as seen in your screenshot above.
FYI – A new PPC ROI solution called ContentCleanser Beta is now available from http://www.contreo.com. It will automatically identify contextually irrelevant websites and MFA (made-for-adsense) sites found in Google’s Placement Performance Report, saving advertisers hours from checking each one manually . More importantly, it has shown to lower one’s cost per lead on Google’s Content Network once all these low quality, irrelevant sites are excluded.