Where Exactly Do Your Ads Appear?

There's a reason why Google is effective.  It puts your ads where targeted, hungry prospects can find them.

Just like in the offline world, the key is location, location, location.

They give you 3 options of where your ads to show, including on Google.com, on search partners, and on the content network.

But, what exactly does each option mean?

After all, if you want to make money, you want your ads in the right places... and off of the bad.

Let's examine what each network means:

1.  Google Only.  The three big search engines on the internet are Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Google is by far has the most amount of searches, followed by Yahoo, and then MSN.

Together these three search engines dominate over 80% of search traffic.

The remaining searches are taken-up by smaller search engines.

This means that in most cases Google is going to generate far more traffic for you than on their search partner sites.

It's also often more profitable than the search and content network.  I think it's often more profitable than other search engines because it has a higher-quality searcher.  Users are savvy enough to visit Google before conducting a search.  This is opposed to typing their search into their web browser or on their internet service provider's home page.

2.  The Search Network.  In addition to Google.com, they have partnerships with other search engines.  Some of the more notable, include AOL, AT&T, Netscape, Ask.com and Earthlink.

The quality of these varies from market to market.  For instance, AOL, typically has a large number of less computer savvy users and likely older users.  This type of traffic may be ideal for certain products.

Any search traffic is usually high-quality because users are actively looking for solutions.

If they type in, "buy computer," you can bet most of these searchers are ready to buy.

3.  The Content Network.  There are countless thousands of sites across the web that show Google ads.

They do it through the "Google AdSense" program.  This program pays site publishers a cut of every click generated from ads shown on their sites.  The ads may be image ads or small text ads that look something like this:

 

It's called the "Content network" because AdSense ads are shown alongside articles, videos, and other website content.

With this type of ad, the user is not necessarily actively searching for information like with search.

However, they can be.  For instance, the top ranked free listing in Google for the term "Buy computer" might be a review site for computers. 

You can then get your ad alongside the review.

As you might guess, this means that what pages your get your ads on is vital.

If it's unrelated (such as Bob's Computer MySpace page), it's more likely to produce junk traffic.  If you get placed alongside the right content, it can be MORE profitable than search advertising.

You may be competing against zero other ads or only three others, instead of dozens.

To pick the right content sites, Google allows you to create placement-targeted campaigns.  Just select "New online campaign" and then "Start with placements."

 

All in all, it's important to understand where your ads are showing-up.  It can mean the difference between being located in wildly profitable web real-estate or in a money-draining low profit area.