Google announced an exciting feature for AdWords advertisers yesterday. Google explained the feature as, "instead of creating separate campaigns for keywords and placements, you can now include both in any campaign. All ad groups now have tabs for both keywords and placements, and the two can work together to target your ads on the content network."
So, if you want to target an ad on my personal blog, which runs AdSense, but only want to show your ad when I talk about SEO or search topics, you can do that now. By combing your placement targeted ads with specific keywords you want your ads to show up for, you can say, only show my ad on cartoonbarry.com when the content matches the keyword [search], for example.
Advertisers are really happy with this feature. A WebmasterWorld thread shares some of the advertiser's delight over this feature:
This is huge news. Using the content network, you can now target specific keywords on specific sites.
I'm hoping this will help get our content campaigns working better. This is definitely a step in the right direction.
This "idea" - the ability to target ads by site - was discussed in the Adsense Forum probably 3 years ago. I guess it has taken all that time to work out the technology because clearly this "solution" made sense a long time ago (in WWW time). Bravo. You're gettin' there Google. Bravo.
A Search Engine Watch Forums thread does complain about the feature being a bit too hard to understand. Moderator Discovery said:
Did you have lawyers write this stuff?
AdWordsAPI Advisor also chimed in at a Google Groups thread. The advisor explained that they were beta testing this feature on a select number of advertisers accounts. The advisor added that there are ramifications to this feature and you should read this thread if you are concerned. If you use the API, the ability to control this feature is in the "production version of the CampaignService WSDLs since v12 was released, and it's the contentTargeting attribute of the Campaign object. It can be set to one of two values: AllPlacements or SelectedPlacements, corresponding to the values in the web UI." For more information, see here.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums and Google Groups.
