An AdWords advertising campaign is built around short but carefully worded advertisements. Although limited in size these advertisements can be very successful in attracting the attention of users who will then click on the advert and be taken to your website.
Two methods for this advertising practice exist related to the positioning of advertisements. Once you’ve set up your AdWords campaign, you will be presented with the option of either placing your ads on the search or the content network (in this case, AdSense), or on both.
Ads in the search network are linked up with a list that contains keywords that are closely tied to the advertisement’s text and will then hopefully catch the eyes of more potential visitors who are actively seeking out your product or service.
Alternatively, using the content network, your advertisement will be placed alongside an article with content relating to your advertisement. In this case it is read by users who may not necessarily be interested in actually purchasing any product or service, and, put another way, are browsers rather than searchers.
The effectiveness and performance of search advertisements far exceed that of contextual advertisements. In order to drive more traffic to your website, though, you could target both networks (in effect ‘broadening your net’) by selecting the search network check box for one and the content network check box for the other.
Contextual adverts have their advantages despite the fact that they may not give as many advantages as a search based advert. Your cost per hit is a lot lower and you’ll have a little more flexibility in where your adverts land.
If you have an active search advert on AdWords and want to try out the content network, you may wish targeting content advertising separately. Although it may be possible for you to reproduce your search network advertising copy verbatim, the content network has a more passive audience and this approach may not be appropriate. Reworking of the copy with this in mind may prove to be a more effective campaign.
In summary, a well-run campaign on a search network will generally be the best and most reliable way to generate business. However, with some cleverness and savvy and well-written copy, it is certainly possible that this could be supported by a complementary campaign running on the content network.
Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.
