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Does Content Match Work?
November 03, 2006
disclaimer 1: I am going to be blunt {“…Abrupt in address; plain; unceremonious…?}
disclaimer 2: This post is not intended to offend, just ask some questions and hope for honest answers
You may know it as Contextual Advertising (Google), or Content Match (Yahoo). Unfortunately for me it has only been synonymous with the age old practice of flushing money down the toilet.
In almost every PPC campaign I’ve had the pleasure of working on this has become an issue that sooner or later must be addressed. And in every campaign that it comes up in the issue seems to be one of relevance, how ironic.
I can definitely attest to the fact that content match generates impressions and clicks. However I have yet to see it produce more relevant clicks than non-content match clicks. Back to being blunt, in other words it can whip up a ton of numbers – especially the kind that cost you money – but I have yet to see it meet the core goal of relevancy.
To take it a step further, every article I read about click fraud seems to describe, if not outright mention contextual matching being used in “Ad Farms? (surprisingly Wikipedia turned up no definition of this term – check this blog post to get a definition if you need one.) This reminds me of a wise saying...."If it smells bad it probably is." Words to live by indeed.
Now I realize that I haven’t seen or done everything so I’m sure there must be some contextual success stories out there. I would love to hear from you and hear your experience with contextual matching. Please remember this is ultimately an exercise to make everything better, but it does feel good to vent sometimes too so let’s hear it.
All posts by Brent Sharp
posted by Brent Sharp at November 3, 2006 10:48 AM
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Comments
I totally agree with you. I have seen it work in a few cases but most of the time it is just a waste of money. What i do not like from the advertiser point of view is that contextual advertising is switch on automatically in an Adwords campaign. If you are a first time user you could easily end up paying the same clickcosts as for normal search.
Posted by: Chris | Zeo zoekmachine marketing at November 7, 2006 08:16 AM
If you want to help improve content matching please visit http://groups.google.com/group/australian-affiliate-marketing and let us know why you think content matching does nto work so we can help improve.
Posted by: clickaffiliate at December 2, 2008 07:34 PM