The following excerpt is from Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes and Bryan Todd’s book Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | IndieBound
A year or two after Google AdWords began, Google started selling ads on its Google Display Network (GDN). At its simplest level, it’s a beautiful system:
- A website owner (the “publisher”) produces content and is eager to make money from the traffic that his site commands.
- He places code on his website, similar to an invisible box, which Google can use as they see fit.
- People (the “advertisers”) pay Google to place their ads on his site, in the invisible boxes.
- Google shares a portion of that income with the publisher.
The publisher doesn’t know which ads will appear on his site, but he trusts Google to screen and manage the advertisers. As a result, he avoids having to spend time looking for advertisers and managing clients on a one-to-one basis.
Google provides you with four different options for selecting your place in the GDN.
Managed placement targeting
With this option, you enter the web address of the sites where you want to advertise. If those sites are available, Google will show your ads there. You can even target a specific area on a site. For example, you can select www.nytimes.com which will give you access to the entire New York Times website, or you can specify www.nytimes.com/section/technology, which will limit your ads to the technology section. This is a good option if you want a lot of control, but it greatly limits your reach.
Topic targeting
Using this option, you can choose broad or narrow categories of sites on which to show your ads. There are, at the time of writing, 2,221 topics to choose from. You can view these in your AdWords account or at https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/ appendix/verticals.
The more specific and drilled-down a topic you choose, the better your targeting will be. For example, “Arts & Entertainment” is extremely broad, but you can drill down to “Arts & Entertainment >; Entertainment Industry >; Recording Industry >; Record Labels” for terrific precision.
Keyword targeting
Topic targeting is an easy place to begin, but for even better results, target by keywords.
Every page on every one of the two-million-plus sites within the GDN has been identified by Google to have…
