Google Adwords articles -
Analyzing the behaviour of your ad on content pages

Google ads can be shown in two different ways:

1. Search related keywords are displayed when you start a search at Google.com.

2. Site related keywords are shown as "Adsense" on many pages on the right or on the bottom of a normal page which is not a search page. The advantage of site related keywords is that a visitor noticed your ad even if he is not looking for your product.

You should always use lower maximum bids on your content bid than on your search bid. A visitor who sees the content Google ad might click on this ad even if he has no strong interest in your product. This might cause a lot of costs.

Check your content ad regularly so you are not surprised by a big bill from Google!

Tapping into practice:

Have a look at this (real) example of a campaign:

This was the start of a new campaign.

The position was from the beginning nearly the same. But what happened on March, 18th?

I filtered for the keyword search only:

The peek on March, 18th was not present in the keyword chart.
Let's see how the content ad performed:

This was a completely new picture of the campaign!!
It seems as if Google needs to learn where to show your content ad. This is the reason why your position went up to 8 in the beginning. Then the position and the impressions were stable over time.

The peek was invoked by the content ad. Is this a sign of click fraud? Let's have a look at the real click-through-rate of this content ad:

False alarm! This was not click fraud! The click-through-rate stayed the same.

I hope you learned something in this lesson how to control your Google Adwords account regarding ads shown on content pages.