The more said about the effectiveness of contextual advertising in PPC..the less. Most advertisers today have realised that catching the potential customer at the time of research or purchase intent is the best way to assure a conversion. Google Adwords allows you to place text or image ads in their network of sites and publishers thereby expanding your reach considerably.
Here's a fine example of contextual advertising. The webpage talks about the finer points of the latest Sennheiser headphones and right on top of the page is a link to buy them. If you're an audiophile you would be tempted...
But, Google themselves warn you that CTR or ‘Click Through Rate’ is not significant when advertising on the content network and not even taken into consideration for calculating the quality score of the campaigns. This is because the impression burn is very high and i’m sure every web surfer comes across these ads at all different positions on the web page and very seldom do they actually click on them.
So what is the trick about reducing impressions?
Keywords- Keep their number low for each ad group. The more focused your keywords are the better will be the performance of the ad.
Negative Keywords – If you think it’s important to generate the ‘long tail’ of keywords to keep your CPCs low, it’s just as important to identify negative keywords that will reduce the number of wasteful impressions. Look at the image below to see what i mean.
The band is known for their high energy performance but would they be able to run motors..hmmm