Last week I presented our latest findings on Contextual Advertising at SES Toronto – posted below.
This Thursday I’ll be delivering an updated version at PPC Summit New York.
Some notable changes in the latest revs of the presentation:
1. Slide #5 describes the (incorrect) way many people believe content advertising works. In the PowerPoint slide show, the slide is displayed, and then a “NOT” symbol flies in and covers the slide.
2. We’ve come to the conclusion that negative keywords operate much differently than in search campaigns – that they don’t prevent ads from appearing on pages that contain the negative keywords; they merely serve to help the keyword set + ad copy match a particular Theme (see earlier posts). We’re in the process of confirming this with our search engine friends, and will report back when we get the word.
3. We’ve devised a strategy (slide 14 in the presentation posted below) that may be the best for optimizing contextual advertising – it’s specific to AdWords for now. I’ll describe it in more detail in a later post, but in short, it advocates using a standard Content campaign as a test-bed for finding new top-performing sites, and then “peeling and sticking” the top sites out of the Content campaign and into a Site-targeted campaign, which gives you the option of setting separate (and different) bids per site, and also the option of paying on a CPC basis or a CPM basis. We’ll be testing the strategy over the next few weeks and reporting back.
