Google Separates AdSense, AdWords Bidding

In other words, you can now bid just for Google.com ads, or for content-driven ads from AdSense. There was a lot of confusion in the marketplace prior to this, now we'll see the two products really evolve independently. MediaPost coverage….

In other words, you can now bid just for Google.com ads, or for content-driven ads from AdSense. There was a lot of confusion in the marketplace prior to this, now we’ll see the two products really evolve independently. MediaPost coverage.

15 thoughts on “Google Separates AdSense, AdWords Bidding”

  1. Even though the content network is weaker in terms of CTR (takes more impressions to get a click), I’m guessing the bids will be higher for content keywords. Why? When you’re bidding for a price you’re willing to pay for a click and the click rate is lower, your total budget allows you to bid higher for the few clicks you get vs. the higher rate you get in search environment. This won’t be the case for all bidders – it seems like a lot of managers burn through their budgets – but the rest of us bid at a rate to sustain a consistent traffic level over the course of time. In that scenario, I can afford to bid a lot more for keywords that perform at a lower rate. The obvious question is why a lower rate would be attractive to me — if i just wanted traffic, it wouldn’t be. But more and more of my ads don’t require a CT to have value – brand messaging and including contact phone numbers, for example, give my clients value without paying for a CT (the new adword optimizing skill? incenting the non-click)

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  2. I disagree with the commenter above since I believe brand ads are small percentage of Google’s volume. Maybe it will increase on the content side, but it will still be dwarfed by the direct response ad world on Google.

    Content clicks don’t convert nearly as well as search clicks. The majority of google ad-spenders care about sales, not brands or impressions, so conversion rate and margin, not CTR, are the prime factors in determining what to bid for keywords.

    When it is easy for more advertisers to separate content from search, the price of content clicks won’t be tied to the search conversion rate, and content price will go down.

    More on Content vs Search ads here:
    http://gotads.blogspot.com/2005/11/separate-bidding-for-adsense.html

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  3. This is great. We were basically running two parallel campaigns – one for search only and one for search and content, with the latter having much lower bids, so that one would catch the content requests. But this is better, no question.

    I would disagree with the previous comment here – we find content clicks to be worth far, far less than search clicks. We look at the cost per conversation and it’s incredibly clear. It also stands to reason – people directed toward a keyword are more likely to buy. People browsing a blog or news article are just clicking away . . .

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  5. John

    Allowing marketers to choose the appropriate spend mix on adsense and adwords is not as simple as giving them the choice between spending on search and content sites. While it is true that most of the impressions on google are search related (except for things like gmail etc), adsense, I would guess, still has far more traffic on search partner sites (adsense for search) than it does for content partner sites (adsense for content).

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  10. This is great. We were basically running two parallel campaigns – one for search only and one for search and content, with the latter having much lower bids, so that one would catch the content requests. But this is better, no question.

    I would disagree with the previous comment here – we find content clicks to be worth far, far less than search clicks. We look at the cost per conversation and it’s incredibly clear. It also stands to reason – people directed toward a keyword are more likely to buy. People browsing a blog or news article are just clicking away . . .

    Reply

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