So here's my take on the content network.
1. Upload between 2,000 and 5,000 keywords per campaign with each adgroup having 50 keywords. This should give you as many as 100 adgroups for those too dopey to work it out.
2. set your bids. for $2 payout I'd do around 0.30. For higher payouts $7-20 I generally go around 0.50-1.00
3. set daily limit at $50. you can go as low as $20, but I prefer $50. this way if the campaign is a stinker I only lose $50. If it flies you can set it as high as you like.
4. leave it for 24 hours. Don't touch anything. Sometimes after 24 hours there will be very few impressions, sometimes the full budget will be spent. Generally the best campaigns will have their full budget spent. some campaigns just never take off.
5. now comes the "secret" to the content network I could sell in an ebook for $97....
go through your adgroups and delete all adgroups with no impressions. If you have made some sales and its a positive ROI, leave the bids alone. If you have made some sales but a slightly negative ROI then reduce bids by 10%. If you have made no sales or a very bad negative ROI send the campaign to campaign heaven and kill it.
6. leave it for another 24-48 hours. you might reduce bids slightly if ROI is not great, but many times I'll just leave them alone.
7. go back to your adgroups and get ready to delete some more. set your google date settings to "all time" and look at every remaining adgroup. the adgroups you want to delete are the adgroups with a low CTR. If your campaigns has had a lot of traffic you want to delete every adgroup under 0.10% - if you haven't had too much traffic you can delete anything under 0.05%
Generally speaking you will be left with 3-6 adgroups out of the original 100. The higher the CTR, the better the campaign will be. The higher the CTR, the lower the cost of the clicks will be. I have a few content network campaigns getting nearly 1.50% CTR, which is insane for the content network.
WARNING - if you have an adgroup with a lot of clicks but a poor CTR of say 0.02% then the clicks will never get cheaper. If you're bidding 0.25 then google will charge you nearly the full amount. However, if your CTR is high you will get cheap clicks in floods. High CTR is the name of the game. Its not uncommon to be bidding 0.30 but you only get charged 0.08 with a high CTR. Anything over 0.25% is great, 0.50% is wicked.
Couple of things;
- if your content campaigns keep getting slapped you need to build different landers.
- you can bid on unrelated keywords, but CTR can be quite low.
- you can add more keywords to a campaign, but don't do it to high CTR campaigns. If you add more keywords that don't take off it will drop your CTR and this you don't want.
