Posted on June 11, 2007 by Tim Schroeder

If you are using Google Adwords, but are not experimenting with Adwords Site Targeting feature, you could be missing out on a lot of low cost, quality traffic.

Site targeting lets AdWords advertisers choose individual websites in the Google content network where they’d like their ads to appear. If you want to place your ad on a single international website, you can. If you want to select dozens of sites about basketball or orchids, you can do that, too. Site targeting lets you handpick your audience, big or small.

When you set up a site-targeted campaign, you first name the sites where you’d like to advertise, or just give us a list of words that describe your site. The AdWords matching system does the rest, analyzing your input and creating a list of available content network sites for you to choose from.

…As with all AdWords advertising, you’ll compete for space with other advertisers. If you choose very prominent and popular sites, you’ll need a higher price to win the ad position. The minimum cost-per-thousand (CPM) bid for a site-targeted ad is US$0.25 or the local currency equivalent.

There are many websites that use Google Adsense on their websites which have little or no site-targeted competition.

I first started experimenting with creative site-targeting on a popular blog you may have already been to called John Chow Dot Com. I was looking to gain a little more exposure and for new members to join a popular webmaster forum I own called Webmaster-Talk.com

At the time, there were only a couple other advertisers using site-targeting to place ads on John Chow’s website. So, I thought I would give it a shot!

The trick to a higher CTR is not simply writing the same old boring ads you see everywhere else. Remember that you will pay for site-targeting on a CPM (cost-per 1000 ad impression) basis so visitors can click on your ad as many times as they want and you will not get charged more. You pay for impressions, not clicks.

My site-targeted ads were so original that his readers kept emailing him telling him about them and he ended up blogging about my ads on his website, making the cost of CPM advertising on his website more than worthwhile. You can read about what he posted here (don’t spell their name wrong )

Here is what some of the ads looked like on his website:

and…

I later added a third site-targeted ad that looked something like this:

John Chow + Tim Schroeder
Best friends forever! Stop by my webmaster
forum when you get a chance.
www.Webmaster-Talk.com

Experiment with the Google Adword’s Site Targeting feature. With a little practice and the right ad copy it can turn out to be a big success!

By the way, I’ll be starting some new site-targeted campaigns for this blog shortly and as always, I’ll let you know how it goes!