Running Content Ads – do know which sites are hurting you?

Running the Placement Performance Report

If you’re running Google Ads on the Content Network then here’s a really useful report for you to run. Once you log in, go to the ‘Reports’ tab in your AdWords account

1. Under ‘report type’ choose ‘Placement Performance’

2. Settings as follows:

Level of Detail = Campaign
Domain or URL = Domain
View = The largest date range you can (at least one month, preferably a quarter)
Date Range = this will be set automatically for you based on View above
Campaigns = manually select each campaign that you have. It’ll be easier to read if you produce a new report for each campaign (ie if you have a different content campaign for different countries)

3. Advanced Settings: no need to change anything here

4. Take advantage of Google’s automation. Email this report to you (with a .csv (for excel) attachment) each month

Now open up the csv file in excel (or whatever you use), delete the first 3 lines, and if you really want this to be easy, setup a quick filter.

Now you can slice & dice your data any way you like. You can see for instance:

• domains where your cost/conversion is too high – see below for next steps
• domains where your CTR is very low (possibly YouTube) that might hurt your overall campaign stats
• domains on which you have very high impressions – which doesn’t matter, but might give you a clue as to other types of sites that you should be on

Now that you have a list of domains on which the performance of your Ads is hurting you (costing too much, not converting, terrible CTR) you can go back to your AdWords account & list these domains in the ‘Site Exclusion’ list for that campaign.

This will stop your Ads showing on those domains. Increases your overall CTR, which (slightly) reduces the CPC & of course, best of all, your cost per conversion drops (sometimes quite dramatically)

Any questions or comments? Would a video help to explain this? Just let me know below.