An AdWords advertising campaign is built around short but carefully worded advertisements. Although limited in size these advertisements can be very successful in attracting the attention of users who will then click on the heading and be taken to your website.

There are two approaches to this form of advertising related to where you place your advert. When you set up your AdWords campaign you will be given the choice of placing your advertisements on either the search or the content network (Adsense) or on both.

Search network or content network?

Advertisements placed on the search network are linked to a list of keywords which closely match the text of the advert and which therefore attract users who are actively searching for your product or service.

On the content network, on the other hand, your advertisement will be placed near an article or blog which relates to it. In this case your advertisement is read by users who are not necessarily interested in purchasing any service or product, in other words, they are browsers rather than searchers.

Contextual advertisements, then, are generally not as effective as search advertisements. However, if you wish to target both markets, creating separate advertising campaigns by checking the search network box for one and the content network box for the other, could well enable you to ‘widen your net’ and drive more traffic to your website.

Running contextual advertisements

Although advertisements placed on the content network may not perform as well as a search based campaign, there are some advantages to using contextual adverts. Not only is the cost per click generally considerably lower but you often have more control over where your adverts are placed.

When arranging placement of the advert ensure that the target site and the pages on which you want your advert to appear are as closely related to the advertising content as possible. It is also preferable to ensure that the site you choose displays its Adsense in such a position that it is not necessary to scroll down to view the advertisements.

If you are already running a search advert on AdWords and wish to test the content network market consider creating a separate campaign aimed at the content advertising audience. Although it is possible to reproduce your search network advertising copy this may not be appropriate for the content network with its more passive audience and a reworking of the copy may be more effective.

Separate campaigns

Running search and content advertisements in the same campaign can skew your statistics and make it difficult to determine the performance of the individual placements. Since the position of your advertisement is dependent on both your cost per click bid (CPC) and the click through rate (CTR) for the search networks and only on the CPC for content networks, poor results from your contextual adverts can adversely affect the placing of your search adverts.

Running them separately enables you to pinpoint any problems as they arise and change the copy to make it more attractive and to improve your results.

Another reason for separating your content adverts from your search adverts is that they may well develop into very different campaigns over time given the different audiences they appeal to.

In the final analysis a well run search network campaign is usually the most effective way to generate business but with a little ingenuity and well written copy there is no reason why this could not be supported by a parallel campaign on the content network.