If you are running an AdWords account you most likely have come across a section within the campaign settings called “Networks and devices”. Within that section you are able to select where you want your ads to be displayed.
If you are looking to setup a campaign which targets the content network, you have two available options: “Relevant pages across the entire network” or “Relevant pages only on the placements I manage”.
Each option has the potential to produce good results, however understanding the differences is vital to your campaign’s success.
If you choose “Relevant pages only on the placements I manage” you are creating a campaign which does not factor in your keywords. You tell AdWords which websites you want your ads to be displayed on and you bid in order to appear on those particular websites. If you feel visitors to a particular website will be interested in your ads, this approach might be a great fit for you.
The problem that you need to keep in mind is that depending on how you bid for a particular website, you could end up having your ad displayed across every single page of that website. Are all those pages relevant to your ads? Most likely they are not.
You can bid on specific pages for a particular website, however you will need to find each relevant page. This can be somewhat time consuming.
The alternative is to choose “Relevant pages across the entire network”. This approach will display your ads across the entire content network depending on which keywords you bid on. AdWords will review your ad group’s keywords and decided where to show your ads. This can work rather well depending on your keywords. If you went with many broad keywords or your ad groups focus on too many different things, you could potentially end up with your ads being displayed on some irrelevant websites.
Whichever approach you decided to take, you need to analyze the resulting performance. Exclude websites which are not performing well and expand into new websites which you might find through data analysis. You can do this by using the AdWords report center or you can analyze your web logs.
The data is there, you just have to look.
