You know about Google’s power in Search advertising, but how about in content — all those hundreds of thousands of independent websites that add Google ads to their pages in the hopes of earning a penny or two from their musings?

Turns out that the Google Content Network is actually “the world’s #1 ad network”, reaching more than 80% of global internet users. Six billion ad impressions are served each day across hundreds of thousands of content network websites (according to comScore Key Measures, October 2008). Thousands of AdWords advertisers place ads on the Content Network to complement their search marketing campaigns on Google.com and the rest of the Google search network.

How do Content Network ads perform for advertisers?
Google recently analyzed conversions, cost, and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) on the Content Network, and compared them to performance metrics on the search network across thousands of campaigns and many geographic regions.

Google have now published a white paper presenting the findings from this analysis. Perhaps surprisingly, it shows that advertisers who advertise on the content network see good results on a number of levels:

• Ads on the Google Content Network are likely to be as cost-effective – or even more cost-effective – than ads on the search network.
• The median advertiser has a content CPA that’s about 2% lower than their search CPA.
• The Content Network drives a significant share of total conversions.
• The Content Network drives nearly 20% of total conversions for the median advertiser.
• Conversion rates are higher for advertisers who used either of two AdWords campaign management controls: the Conversion Optimizer and site exclusion.

Content websites, from our perspective, have one significant advantage over search pages: consumers are not merely “passing through” the content website in a quest for some final destination, as they are in search. They’re more likely to linger, more likely to be interested in the primary topic of the website and thus potentially more interested in your marketing message as long as it’s directly related to the website topic (hence the importance of “site exclusion”, to ensure your communications are correctly targeted).

You’ll find the Google white paper here.

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