Content clicks are of much lower quality, but for selling things to middle American housewives, there are many, many content clicks which are really search clicks.
Are you familiar with about.com, Demand Media, et al? Here's one inch on the basalt monolith: they get the overwhelming majority of their traffic directly from Google, and exist so that they can get a click on their AdWords ad. Classic arbitrage -- Google should hate it but, well, after you reach a certain scale the rules that can't be disclosed to you change.
Thus you get a frequent scenario such as this:
1) Customer Googles some keyword of value with a very, very high CPC. Say, [halloween bingo], which probably costs in the vicinity of $2-$3 on Google. (I don't know because it is higher than where I could profitably monetize it, but I have a general idea of where the ceiling should be.)
2) Customer lands on a page on about.com. The page is garbage and does not satisfy the customer's desire.
3) Customer clicks on the first thing they see which advances their interests -- an AdWords ad. Because content clicks are severely undervalued, that click costs 6 cents rather than $2, even though it is essentially a search click.
One of Google's many dirty little secrets is that the Content Network is essentially a second bite at the apple for getting folks to click on AdWords ads when they didn't on the SERP.
Ah I hadn't thought of that, which is kinda stupid considering I have a site that gets thousands of adsense clicks with >75% of them coming right out of a google search.
I haven't used adwords much. Can you target content networks to very specific domains or pages within domains?
Are you familiar with about.com, Demand Media, et al? Here's one inch on the basalt monolith: they get the overwhelming majority of their traffic directly from Google, and exist so that they can get a click on their AdWords ad. Classic arbitrage -- Google should hate it but, well, after you reach a certain scale the rules that can't be disclosed to you change.
Thus you get a frequent scenario such as this:
1) Customer Googles some keyword of value with a very, very high CPC. Say, [halloween bingo], which probably costs in the vicinity of $2-$3 on Google. (I don't know because it is higher than where I could profitably monetize it, but I have a general idea of where the ceiling should be.)
2) Customer lands on a page on about.com. The page is garbage and does not satisfy the customer's desire.
3) Customer clicks on the first thing they see which advances their interests -- an AdWords ad. Because content clicks are severely undervalued, that click costs 6 cents rather than $2, even though it is essentially a search click.
One of Google's many dirty little secrets is that the Content Network is essentially a second bite at the apple for getting folks to click on AdWords ads when they didn't on the SERP.