Placement Performance Reports - new feature from Google Adwords

Posted on June 14th, 2007 in Paid Search.

A new report called Placement Performance Reports is being introduced by Google Adwords. What is this report? Now when you run campaigns on Google Content Network, you will only get the aggregate performance data of your campaigns. However with this new report you will be able to see the performance data of each of the individual domain / URL in the Google content network.

Earlier Google did launch the pay per action or cost per action (CPA) model of advertising, however that dosent seem to have grabbed enough publishers to adopt the system. This is an expected behavior because for publishers to adopt a CPA model, they will need to be provided with lot more information and support like the CPA networks (cj, linkshare…) do.

The CPA model was a move by Google let advertiser know that Google is working towards providing value for the advertiser. Since the CPA model hasn’t picked up momentum for Google, the placement performance report looks like a workaround for that.

A good number of advertisers use their own /third party tracking systems to find out the preformance of each individual domain / URL from the google content network. However tracking systems do have their own limitations and at times not able to grab this data. Now that google themselves are going to give this data, is a welcome move.

Now why is this data so important?

1) With the placement performance report you can identify websites that send in traffic that converts and allocate more spend on those sites utilizing the site targeting tool within adwords

2) With the placement performance report you can identify websites that send in bad traffic that dosent convert and remove those sites utilizing the site exclusion tool within adwords

This gives the advertiser the power to identify the sites that convert well & scale the campaigns and remove the junk sites from the campaigns saving some dollars. This report is currently available only to a few advertisers, and looks like will be available to all advertisers in a few weeks time. If you like more details about creating placement performance reports and some best practices on how to use this data head over to the Google Adwords Blog