"How do placements and keywords work together in an ad group?"

sourece by:google adwords

How do placements and keywords work together in an ad group?

How do placements and keywords work together in an ad group?

When you choose both keywords and placements for an AdWords ad group, they team up to determine where your ads will run on the Display Network and how much you'll pay for them. (The combination won't affect where your ads run on the Search Network. This is based only on keywords.)

How do they work together? Here are two key points to remember.

Step 1: Keywords always do their work first. When an ad group has keywords, the AdWords system automatically finds pages in the Google Display Network to find content that matches those keywords. AdWords takes contextual matching down to the page level, therefore if a placement has multiple pages, only pages that match your keywords can show your ads.

Step 2: You choose how they work together. Where your ads run and how much you pay for them depends on a choice you make in your network distribution campaign settings.

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If you select Relevant pages across the entire network:

Keywords alone determine where your ads are eligible to show. You can add managed placements to an ad group, but their only purpose will be to raise or lower your bid when keyword matching puts your ad on one of those placements. Adjusting bids helps you win more or fewer ad auctions (and therefore clicks and impressions) on those managed placements. So, if you find a site that performs well, you can increase your bid for that site. On the other hand, if you have a site that is performing poorly, but you don't want to completely exclude it, you can adjust your bid to reach your goals.
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If you select Relevant pages only on the placements I manage:

Keywords and placements determine where your ads are eligible to show. When you choose both keywords and placements, you can restrict your ads to the specific sites where you want them to appear -- and show them only when the content of a page is relevant to your keywords. Using keywords to refine the targeting for your ads on placements is a good option when you're targeting sites that have a wide variety of content (such as news sites and social networks). That way, your ads will be more likely to appear in relevant locations on those sites. Adding keywords also limits the potential number of clicks and impressions, so you should monitor your ad's performance to make sure you're seeing the results you want.

Let's look at that second situation more closely. Suppose your campaign is set for "Relevant pages only on the placements I manage," and you create an ad group with managed placements A, B, and C, and the keyword "red roses." In that case, your ad will appear on placements A, B, and C only if their content is related to "red roses."

If matches for "red roses" appear only on A and B, then your ads can appear only on A and B. Your ad won't appear on placement C, even though you've selected it. Because placement C doesn't have any content about red roses, it's not a contextual match for your keyword.

Suppose placement A is a website about flowers, with 100 different pages: five about red roses, and 95 about other flower varieties. Because contextual targeting happens down to the page level, AdWords may identify only those five pages about red roses as a good match for your keyword. Your ad won't appear on the other 95 pages of A, even though you've targeted the entire website, if those pages aren't a good match for your keywords.

Of course you can also create an ad group or campaign with only keywords or only placements. If you want contextual targeting to be the only deciding factor, then you can choose a keyword-only ad group.

If you want your ads to show anywhere on a given placement, with no regard to contextual matching, then create an ad group with placements only, and set your campaign settings to "Relevant pages only on the placements I manage." That way only the placements you choose will determine where your ad can appear.

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