AdWords Help

The Placement Performance report helps you reach your marketing objectives by giving you increased transparency into your campaign's performance on the Google content network. Use the report to help you manage your campaigns and reach your ROI objectives on the content network.

Below are five essential tips to help you make the most of the Placement Performance report.

1. Think in terms of conversions
When taking action on information provided in the Placement Performance report, we recommend you rely on conversion data to guide you. This will help you understand how individual sites are converting for you. We offer two free tools for advertising accountability: Google conversion tracking and Google Analytics.

Google Conversion Tracking Tracks the number of users who conduct a certain action on your site after clicking on one of your ads. Learn More

Google Analytics A robust tool that, in addition to measuring the results of your campaigns on driving traffic to your site, also measures what users do when they get to your site. Learn More

2. Focus on the right areas by sorting
The Placement Performance report displays a wealth of information about your ads' exposure on the content network. This can be overwhelming and knowing where to start can be a challenge.

Focus on the areas that matter the most by initially sorting the data by fields such as 'Clicks' or 'Cost'. This will help you focus on the domains or URLs where your ads are getting the most exposure.

In the example below, we sorted our report by the 'Clicks' column, helping us focus our attention on sites where our ads have accrued the most traffic. From here, we can analyze our conversion metrics for these sites to determine next steps.

3. Act only on statistically significant data
Some sites may have little data associated with them in your Placement Performance report. For example, you may notice sites that accrued very few impressions, while others may have accrued many impressions, but only a few clicks. In these cases, we recommend waiting for enough data to accrue before taking action on these sites. With time, you may find that these sites convert and deliver signif cant value once enough statistics have accumulated.

In the example report below, after sorting the data by the 'Clicks' column, we see that the sites everythingsoccer.com, sports-news.com and shopsoccer.com have accrued a significant number of impressions and clicks. This provides us with substantial data so that we can look at the conversion data for these sites to guide our next steps.

Below, we can see that there are also a number of sites in the report that have not accrued enough data yet. For example, basic-sports.net and blog-soccer.net accrued tens of thousands of impressions, but only a handful of clicks. In this case, it's best to wait until these sites accrue additional clicks before deciding whether these clicks will convert into sales. Similarly, the sites mindofathletes.com and athletesrus.com have not accrued enough impressions or clicks, making it too early to gauge their performance.

4. Don't focus on clickthrough rate (CTR)
Don't worry if your clickthrough rate (CTR) on content sites is lower than what you're used to seeing on the search network. It's normal for CTR to be lower on the content network because user behavior on content pages is different than on search sites -- users on content pages are browsing through information, not searching with keywords. Remember:

• Just because you have a low CTR on a content site doesn't mean you're performing poorly.
• In keyword-targeted campaigns, you only pay for clicks, regardless of the number of impressions your ad may receive.
• Your ad performance on the content network does not affect your performance, cost-per-clicks (CPCs), or position on Google.com or on other pages in the search network.

For these reasons, we recommend that your conversion tracking data and ultimately your ROI, not your CTR, is the true performance gauge for your ads.

In the example below, you can see that despite a low CTR of 0.05% for basic-sports.net, this site has started to generate conversions at a 10% rate and a cost per conversion of $1.30.

5. Optimize for success
The Placement Performance report can provide you with vast amounts of data about the performance of your campaigns on the content network, making it a powerful tool you can use to improve campaign performance. Here are some tips on optimizing for success on the content network:

Re-evaluate your keywords and creatives
If you find your ads are appearing on irrelevant pages, take steps to optimize your keyword lists and ads. For example, adding negative keywords is one way of refining your ad targeting on the content network. We also recommend creating content-only campaigns, which will enable you to tweak your ad group and structure it for content pages without affecting the performance of your search campaigns. For additional tips on how to optimize your campaigns for the content network, visit http://www.google.com/adwords/content-optimize

Utilize the placement targeting feature
For sites that are meeting your ROI objectives, consider targeting them using our placement targeting feature. Please note that when using placement targeting, you have the choice of either cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) bidding.

Consider the Site and Category Exclusion tool
For sites that are not meeting your ROI objectives after having accrued significant traffic, consider excluding them from your campaign with our Site and Category Exclusion tool.

Avoid excluding sites based on subjective judgments on the content or quality of the site. Remember:

• Page content is dynamic and may change from the time the user has viewed the page and clicked on your ad to the time you view the Placement Performance report.
• Sites or pages that you don't find relevant may still be useful to other users. For this reason, the best way to determine the value of a site is to rely on conversion data to determine whether a particular site meets your ROI objectives.

Additional tips

• Run the Placement Performance report at the URL level. This will give you the granularity necessary to determine the type of content your ads are appearing on. Remember that our system targets your ad at the page level, not the domain level.
• If you find that you're not seeing enough data in your Placement Performance report, try running the report for a longer period to see additional results. We recommend running the report for a date range that includes one or two weeks, although this will ultimately vary based on the size of your account.
• One way to limit the size of your report is to filter out sites with few impressions. For example, you may want to exclude sites that accrued less than 50 impressions from your report. You can do this by using the drop-down menu under the 'Advanced Settings' sections of the report creation wizard.