13 Deadly Sins of AdWords – #9 Foolishness

“Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding.” – Proverbs 9:6

Foolishness

Many would say that all of the 13 Deadly Sins arise from foolishness. However, the sin of Foolishness is manifested most clearly by AdWords accounts which allow the content network to go unmonitored. The content network gives you access to millions of users across the internet. Everywhere from MySpace.com to Gmail you can see the fruits of the content network. However, with great power comes great responsibility.

Bridle Your Content Settings

The reason that you must monitor the content network more closely than search is because the fundamental principles are different. Search ads appear when a user is searching a relevant term. Content impressions come when a user is reading a blog, updating their profile or reading an email. Your ad must interrupt them and take them off course. Therefore, content network ads often must be more in-your-face and attention grabbing.

Content impressions are also at the mercy of Google’s almighty algorithm. While an ad for the local deli is relevant to a recipe on a blog post it isn’t relevant for the news article about the local theater “hamming it up” on the stage. If you don’t pay attention, your ad could be showing all kinds of places you don’t want.

Repentance Is In The Settings

From the Campaign Summary view click a campaign that is running content network ads. Under the campaign name you will see “No site or category exclusions : Add”. Click Add. Here are four very important tabs for controlling the content network:

• Sites: Here you can manually enter sites where you don’t want your ads to appear.
• Topics: Google categorizes certain types of sites for your convenience. I recommend checking all 6 boxes.
• Media Types: Only relevant if you have video ads.
• Page Types: The effectiveness of these categories will depend on your market. Testing is the best way to determine what to keep and what to toss. Beware of the sins of Laziness or Negligence.

Now you may “go in the way of understanding” and harness the vast potential of the Google content network.