How To Optimize A Contextual Search Advertising Campaign

Brad Geddes at Search Engine Land, wrote a great article about optimizing your contextual search campaigns when advertising on Google and Yahoo!. A lot of advertisers group search and content ads together, which is not good for business. The reason being is that when advertising in these two areas you are going after different types of customers or visitors. Content ads are within the content pages on Web sites that choose to advertise Google ads. The people who are on these pages are not necssarily actively searching for anything. It is more of a passive experience. With that said the keywords and ads need to be developed with a different mind-set than if the ads were coming up in a search result.

Brad explains how all of this works, and makes several great points about not combining search and content ads in the same campaigns. The reason being that it will throw off your reporting and make your data look way off. For example, your paid search ads may be bringing in a CTR of 5%, but your content ads only 1%. That is not necessarily bad, it is the nature of the environment in which your ads sits.