It does require more baby sitting than Search Ads but your ROI can skyrocket with experience and with the fact that so many are shying away from the content network, leaving room for those players that are able to actually calculate their ROI.

However, for generic terms the conversion rate is abysmal.

Overall, AdWords is a great tool but requires constant attention to maximize it’s effectiveness.

I’ve stayed away from the Content Network ( especially banners ) since 2005.

“Google is not ahead of us, In the area of search specifically, Google would lead.”

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

Right now advertising in the local sphere is booming, I see numerous niches/industries where small businesses found their way to online advertising with Google , they get their products and services out for their local audience online .

If you are concerned about the quality of your Adwords traffic, make sure you opt-out of the content network (content network= publishers who display Google ads on their websites) .

By opting-out you will only receive traffic from Google itself .

You have to do it right, but it is very common to get a 30%+ monthly ROI on your advertising $$ (thats a very safe estimate, not uncommon a much higher figure )

Kristian

Google does incremental improvements on their Adsense offering but Yahoo can’t get out of the beta (it’s been TWO years now, Yahoo!) for their content ads on partner websites and MS is doing everything else BUT broad based contextual ads on other websites (which bring in 34% of G’s revenue).

For the record, Site targeted (now called Placement Targeted) campaigns have previously allowed the advertiser to select specific areas within a particular domain for their ads to show. So, this is not new. The CPC option and the name are new.

You guys are right, ppc does take some practice, and compared to Google, Yahoo is pathetic and AdCenter is almost completely worthless.

I don’t know about others, but I tried AdWords with no success. No matter how hard I tried to customize the campaign (such as changing ad copy, filtering target to U.S. only, etc.), the results were the same.

If this happens to me, it could happen to others. I stopped using AdWords for now because I don’t know why I should spend money for junk traffic.

It took a very controversial blog post to get them to talk about these changes.

This is the latest in about 20 changes that Google has instituted as a result of some controversial posts that often resulted in vile insults from other commenters and deletions from the blog owner.

You have to wonder with all the PHDs and brainiacs who work there - how just ONE BLOG POSTER can trigger so many changes.

Visit the archives or that blog and read the months of sarcasm by the other commenters including deletions by the blog owner that resulted from various controversial posts.

Ironically, many of those suggestions ended up being taken? LOL:

You can imagine what the politics are like there? Few employees would dare risk that to show a company their flaws and insists on wide ranging
re evaluations, and reforms.

While a regular commenter - who no one knows anything about - will only receive insulting replies to posts, employees could have their careers compromise and be ostracized as not fitting in or being against the company’s mission.

Just imagine how different Yahoo’s fate would have been if there was an outlet years ago for this type of interaction from the public.

Everything else is just mumbo jumbo. Sorry, “targeted mumbo jumbo”.

You know? I read TechCrunch since 2003 (I think) and if I close my eyes right now I can´t tell where adsense is in this page.

People who clicks en adsense (I´m talking about publishers network here) is people who bounce of the page. So that much for “targeted placement”.

It´s not like I´m reading about iPhone in TC and I think: “I want one, lets click in this adword”. Nah, if I´m reading about Iphone here and just happen to want one I SEARCH for it.

For branding it´s ok, but if you´re after conversions search is the answer.