Part V (and last) in a Series on Content Match
I must confess to being eager to get on with a Functionalism Blog since we released our White Paper on this and have been getting a lot of response. But I also want to round out this series on Content Match – so for the moment I’ll just point people to our site (http://www.semphonic.com/resources/whitepapers.asp) for the white paper and to the Web Analytics forum where I posted the original notice and made some follow-up comments based on a post from Eric Peterson (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/webanalytics/message/7418). In addition, I promise a Blog even quicker than normal to kick off the Functionalism series.
So back to Content Match. In the past four entries, I’ve covered some optimization techniques for Content Match that I think are pretty valuable. But I realize one thing I haven’t done is provide any reason why you should care. If you’re already buying Content Match, that isn’t (I assume) an issue. But if you aren’t a Content Match buyer, I doubt my previous posts would be likely to make you think you should be starting.
That isn’t necessarily the way I feel. I know that lots of SEM buyers won’t do Content Match – often because of bad experiences in the past. I hope that the techniques I’ve laid out would address some of those bad experiences – indeed, I think that quite often buyers had bad Content Match performance and gave up without ever really learning why things weren’t working well.
So here are some reasons why – if you are already buying PPC on Search – you might want to think about content match.
First and foremost, is scalability. Most PPC search campaigns have limited scalability. Because Search is a direct response mechanism, your performance will decline geometrically the farther your search terms stray from direct relevancy. You might think this is just identical to Content Match (and intellectually it is) but the practical consequences are quite different. Here’s the reason: those non-relevant search terms are highly relevant to some other business. So they will get more clicks to impressions than you will. That means you’ll have to raise your bid to buy the real-estate. This quickly becomes untenable. This doesn’t happen so much with Content Match – where every placement is generally less relevant. The upshot is that using Content Match you can scale many programs significantly beyond their search levels (this may be one of the few times I’ve ever said anything truly pleasing to Google!).
A second reason to consider Content Match is to target niche sites that are highly relevant to your business – in some cases there exist publishing sites that are so specific to a business that their performance will greatly exceed search. Admittedly, you might want to consider site targeting in these cases (and at some point I’ll talk about site targeting because it too as interesting aspects), but if you can get your ads on these sites with Content Match then you’ll be much better off than with site targeting.
Finally, Content Match provides some interesting new strategies for reaching qualified prospects. Principal among these is targeting competitor "brand" terms. Between legal threats, editorial restrictions and Google minimum bids, direct targeting of competitors in search is much more difficult than it used to be. But you can still use Content Match to do this. I wrote an article on this for ADOTAS (http://www.adotas.com/2006/08/like-snatching-keywords-from-competitors-why-content-matching-could-give-you-sem-advantage/) so I’ll just point you there.
I think that’s about it. As I mentioned in my open, we’ve found Content Match to be quite a tricky beast to optimize. If you have other thoughts or experiences with optimization techniques, I’d love to hear about them since I feel like we (as a company) are still a long way from being the confident experts we are supposed to be!
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