Google Search Network VS Content Network

Google Adwords is Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program that allows you to advertise on Google or its affiliate sites and every time a user clicks on your advert, you pay a fee to Google.

When done right, a company with even a very small monthly budget can have a ppc advert that is seen by thousands of people in a short space of time. Google splits its ppc advertising into 2 areas, as discussed below.

Google Adwords has 2 types of networks that you can display pay-per-click advertising upon:

1. Search Network (including search partners)
2. Content Network

When setting up a Google Adwords PPC campaign you will be given an option under “Networks, devices and extensions” to choose all networks (default) or to manually select if you want to specify if your advert is displayed only on a Google search engine results page (SERP) or if you want to include other websites with Google ad’s.

This is something you must decide for yourself, as some products/services will not perform well on the content network but then again they may perform much better than on a Google SERP. For example, a website for selling umbrellas might perform much better on a Google SERP because if you target sites on the content network about umbrellas, they may tend to be sales sights (as oppose to information sites).

When targeting the content network if you have the time then you should select the sites yourself, as Google could display your advert on sites it thinks are relevant but are are not.

1. Search Network (including Search Partners)

When a user does a search on Google for similar keywords to the ones you have targeted on Adwords, the advert will be displayed in the “Sponsored Results” section of a Google search engine results page. This is the primary Adwords location for displaying PPC adverts. This is arguably the best place for adverts for cost-per-click ads (compared to cost-per-impression ads) because users who type in a search query (keyword) that see your advert and click-through it to your site are targeted by the keyword, which should be very relevant to your product/service.

The Google Search Network is not only limited to it’s search engine results page but you must also take into account its “Search Partners” (different to the content network).

Search Partners

Google has agreements with other websites and search engines (we are not completely sure on all the sites that are under the “Search Partner” classification but some of them are listed on this image) to display its ads on their sites – the official statement is “Your ads may appear alongside or above search results, as part of a results page as a user navigates through a site’s directory, or on other relevant search pages”.

• Search partners are Google sites and large corporations that are classed as being under Google’s Search Network.
• Some of these include: Google Maps, Google Product Search and Google Groups along with entities such as Virgin Media and Amazon.co.uk.

2. Content Network

The content network are websites that have the “Google Adsense” enabled on them. Google claim to reach 80% of internet users on its content network (wow) – equating to six billion pay-per-click ad impressions served each day, across hundreds of thousands of Content Network websites*. Anyone can have “Adsense” activated on their website and the website owner will get a small percentage of the pay-per-click charge that Google takes from the advertiser. This can be an advantage to advertisers because if people click on your advert it is usually from a related website to your product/service, therefore if someone is already on that site then you know they they have at least some interest in what you are selling, making conversions quite likely (conversions are users who are converted from seeing your advert to clicking on and then either buying your product/service.

Google’s targeting technology matches your pay-per-click ads with the web users most likely to become real customers. An advertiser that utilizes Google’s content network will have ads placed on sites that have similar themes to the keywords that are chosen for that ad. So for instance say you are using “gourmet coffee beans” as a keyword, using the Content Network your ad will be featured on coffee review sites, sites selling coffee makers, and perhaps coffeehouse blogs. With your ad on these related sites you can choose to pay each time that ad is clicked on, or each time it appears for someone to see. Content Network advertising is mostly used to create brand awareness. The thought behind this style of advertising is that when someone is searching for a coffeemaker and sees your ad they may or may not click on it, but due to the brand loyalty that can developed with a well structured ad, perhaps after they order their coffee maker they will need some coffee beans and go to your site.