Placement targeting

Looking to improve your campaign's performance on the content network? Jessica, a retail content network specialist, offers some tips on placement targeting to help you reach the right audience.

JESSICA: Placement targeting is an AdWords feature that lets you choose specific sites in the content network to display your ads. It's an effective way for retail advertisers to target specific segments of a consumer audience. With placement targeting, you can:

• Select placements by subject matter, audience demographics, or specific URLs.
• Elect to show your ads on an entire site, a section of the site, or just an individual page or two. Visit our partners page to view examples of sites you can placement target.

Benefits

JESSICA: When you hand-pick specific site sections, you can:

• Reach a more targeted audience, which means higher chances of conversion.
• Choose between two bid types: cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding, where you bid for each 1000 impressions your ad receives, or CPC bidding, where you bid for each click.
• Adjust bids based on how well the site is performing or how desirable the site is.
• Use various ad formats — such as image ads or video ads — to showcase your brand and engage visitors in different ways.

Tips and techniques

JESSICA: Using the example graphic above, here are a few ways to get the most out of your hand-picked site placements:

• One often-overlooked technique is placing ads on specific, hand-picked sections of a publisher website. For example, if you sell sporting goods, you might choose to show ads only on the sports section of a news site, rather than placing ads across the entire site. Instead of targeting all of www.example.com, you could place your ads on www.example.com/sports, or even more specifically, www.example.com/sports/baseball.
• Look for site sections that feature consumer reviews, news, and new product information to find the most relevant placements.
• Run a Placement Performance report to find out which of your currently selected sites are performing well, and which aren't.
• Delve into demographic targeting within the Placement Tool to select sites based on your target audience. For instance, back-to-school retailers should consider sites popular for Moms or College Students.

Try it

Ready to try targeting specific site sections? Once you've created a placement targeted campaign, click 'Edit placements and bids' at the top of the ad group table. Enter the URLs of the specific site sections where you'd like your ad to appear -- you can refer to the actual site's URL to see how its sections are named.

To learn more about placement targeting, visit the content network website.

For more content network tips straight from a specialist, send Jessica your questions at retail-newsletter@google.com.