What is Pure Google? - When you set up a Google campaign, you have the options of Google, Network and Content.  These are choices you will find in "Edit Settings" and we suggest you pay attention to how these work.  Pure Google is the first choice.  This means your ads will only be shown to people searching on Google's website.  This will be your highest value and where you need to concentrate the bulk of your budget.

     What is Google Network? - This is when Google displays your ads on websites other than Google's primary search screen.  This might be the search feature on CNN's website, the New York Times or thousand of lesser quality websites.  These leads are not as clean and valuable as the Pure Google choice. 

     What is Content? - Here we have the lowest value to you.  Content is when Google displays your ads on websites that might be talking about your service or product . . . or might not.  This is not done by a person, so if the computer program thinks your ad might be interesting to the view, it gets displayed.  We had one client selling Zebra brand printers for businesses.  And Google was delivering their ads to people searching for "zebra bikinis" and "zebra posters" and a variety of other junk.  By the way, there is a way to control that, but it is a bit tricky so we will leave that for another post.  And if you think it is just clicking a button, you're wrong.  It involves running a specific report within Google analytics and then tinkering with a variety of settings.

     How to Bid for Pure Google, Network and Content - This is the heart of it.  Google only allows you to set separate bids for Content and then one bid for Pure Google and the Network together.  We don't like that, so we set up a duplicate campaign.  This now allows us to bid $5.00 for Pure Google, $2.50 for Network and 50 cents for Network.  I am using the $5.00 as an example, but the ratios are correct.  We have found Network to be half as valuable as Pure Google and Content to be worth 10%.  This means we get half the number of conversions from Network and just one tenth from Content.  By the way, we actually set up three identical campaigns so we can set bids for each area AND we can track each independently.

     More details in the next post.

   Free Conference Call - I am simplifying this as much as I can, as this is a basic blog.  If you are interested in a conference call where I will discuss these bidding strategies and how to set this up, please email me at Mike@MikeMorgan.us or call me at 888-227-5217.  No charge.  It will be a freebie, and I will not try to sell you anything and I will not put you on any email list.  It's a pure freebie.