Is looking for sites to to media buys a waste of time?

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Delta223

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Aug 14, 2009
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I've been scouting for websites in my niche that have a good amount of traffic. Google Adwords pointed me to quite a few sites that get 10-100k or even 100k+ impressions a day.

However cross checking these results on quantcast or compete.com yields poor results (either adwords estimate are way too high, or quancast/compete is way too low)

I've heard that there is so much traffic in media buying that you don't need any other advertising medium. But from looking at individual sites this doesn't seem to be the case. Should I just go with the big Ad networks? Or am I missing something else when looking at individual sites?
 


I would test the traffic first with targeted adwords placements to see if any of the sites even perform. If the traffic converts, try contacting them directly to buy some inventory. Some of my best campaigns have been deals I put together directly with site owners. If that doesn't work, go to the networks.
 
I have a little over 200 managed placements and my bid is fairly high (since my average ad positition is 1.2) The traffic volume has been garbage so far, 600 impressions on one day and 100 on the other. conservative estimates across all those sites should yield at least 1,000,000 impressions a day.

-Managed placements do not use keyword targetting so that is not the problem.
-Several sites on the list had an estimated daily traffic of 500k+. And yes I'm using run-of-site on them.

From searching the google forums, people are having trouble with the new interface. Apparently the last few days there have been update issues; for some people they only get 1 update a day.

That still doesn't explain why I'm getting so few impressions. I was expecting to hit my ad budget and refine down my list!
 
Welcome to this issue with the content network.

It's very confusing for why there are so few impressions on the content network, which is supposed to be one of the largest advertising network, even if you bid very high and have a good CTR.

One explanation may be a very low quality score on the landing page. Unfortunately you can't see the quality score in the interface for content network campaigns. But it exists and my Google rep also confirmed it as a problem for low impressions:

our
system has crawled the sites for these campaigns and deemed the landing
pages in question to have low quality scores. Your landing page quality
needs to be improved if you'd like to increase your Quality Scores, lower
your costs and increase your exposure on the content network.

Let me explain why we incorporate landing page quality into Quality Score:
Our market research shows that low quality sites lead to a poor user
experience, and unhappy users are less likely to click AdWords ads. High
quality sites lead to better user experience and a higher return on
investment for advertisers.
Click to expand...
and further ...

Unfortunately, it is not possible to view this
information within your Adwords interface. Due to the dynamic and
automated nature of the way our system crawls your sites, we cannot
provide you with any more information on the quality score of your sites
at present. This information would not be present in the ads diagnostic
tool for your keywords.
Click to expand...
The only other explanation I would have would be that the inventar is used for long running campaigns, some weird behaviour of the adwords content network system.

Maybe someone else can bring more ideas to why this happens to the table. It's a really frustrating situation right now.
 
What that says to me is that I need to cut Google out of the equation immediately. I'm losing too much time trying to sort out this nonsense.
 
This is why Google may get less impressions.

If these sites run their own advertising they may charge x for cpm bought directly from them, they may sell inventory in bulk to ad networks for a little less than x, they then take all the shit inventory that nobody bought and run google adsense and make much less than the x they were originally charging.

If they can sell all the inventory for a higher price why would they run adsense that day?

This is why traffic flucuates
 
I've also always had the experience of picking placements on google content, setting high bids and getting no impressions. If I could figure it out maybe I'd use content network more.
 
miketpowell said:
I've also always had the experience of picking placements on google content, setting high bids and getting no impressions. If I could figure it out maybe I'd use content network more.
Click to expand...

did you even read what I wrote... perhaps that can shed some light... some sites have over 10 dollar cpm's
 
jsphfcll I dont think this is the explanation. If you take a keyword like "Lose Weight" and create a content network adgroup with it. Your CTR is even 1%. You bid really high, lets say $2 per click.

Would you say there is only an inventar like 1,000 impressions a day available to that? That's really not the case. Alone on Youtube.com you could get way more. There must be something else going on.

My theory is that there is some kind of harmonizing algorithm in place, and it is not only taking bidprize and CTR into account, which seems to be logical at first. Or it is just this invisible content network quality score. I've tried to take over inventar on adsense sites with bidding $10 CPC or $80 CPM without success. And there was way more adsense inventar on the site available.
 
if you are promoting rebills google does not like it... google does not like affiliates. They place a low quality score on your account and anything new you add to it has the same low quality score. I deal with them everyday and actually talk to them on the phone. This is the case regardless of niche, once they find you you need to do the various things discussed all over this forum to create a new account... good luck

Perhaps the ones you are seeing have yet to be slapped or Google allows some sites if you personally own that product... i used to work at companies that actually own the product and they were allowed...

sorry if this does not help
 
also I used to work at an ad network and we filled our remnant space with ad sense and some sites do not allow certain things like rebills so we filtered them out :) of those channels... like lets say we owned inventory on orbitz.com they wouldnt like it if we let in sites like hotels.com...

bottom line is if you rely on google for your traffic you play by there rules... they could careless if you dont agree... I worked at a company that spent well over 7 figures a month who constantly went through the same struggle...

good luck
 
^ This is spot on, there are simply commercial influences for placements, I've seen this first hand by seeing massive impressions overnight on news sites when the target demographic are less active the adspace reverts to adsense.
 
Yes, thats one influence. Another one might be the quality score that is attached to a content campaign. I run a content campaign that gets around 250,000 impressions daily and constantly. It even seems to get pushed further into new placements and more reach. Another one is struggling to get any share at all on the same theme of keywords with good CTR. The account spends 6-figures a month right now and many campaigns are at the top of what they can do, highly optimized. It has a great history and initial QS are really good.

All that shows that while there is inventar, it probably will go only to content-campaigns that get a high quality score (landing page), which unfortunately you can't see in the account.
 
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