How NOT to do placement targetted adwords – James Caan Style.
My adsense earnings have dropped on a lot of my niche sites, and it is James Caan’s fault!
His online marketing team, clearly dont know seem to know what they are doing.
Ever since Caan started promoting his seminars, his ads are appearing everywhere – in as far as I can see – on any and all websites that carry adsense, so everything from food websites, to writing websites etc etc all have his face appearing in placement targetted google ads for his one day seminars..
The problem is he is promoting to people who have no interest at all. – And that is the biggest mistake in marketing. A targetted offer, to a targetted crowd, are clear essentials for success
That causes two serious problems.
i/ Because the ads are untargetted, his conversion will be low or nothing ….
ii/ Because the ads are untargetted, my earnings drop too because they displace more targetted offers …!!
Moral of the story?
i/ Placement targetted ads are great.
The hidden jewel of adwords provided that:
(a) you only pick sites that rank for your keywords with ads above the first fold and:
(b) kick out any sites that dont give you better than 3% CTR…my rule is if I dont get one click in 100 impressions, I remove it from the list.(on placement you dont need high CTR to get click cost down)
then:
(c) having picked the sites you go CPM cost per impressions – and then you get targetted clicks which can be as low as 1/10 price of those on adwords for search.
But and it is a MASSIVE BUT
ii/ It is easy to use placement badly. To target people who simply have no interest in your offer.
So if you see someone misusing your ad space, google give you the tools to ban them on adsense….I have.
James Caan is now persona non grata for all my sites. He is a spammer!!
I tried to contact him via his main site to explain the problem. Got no response, so his customer services team match his online marketers in performance it seems!