Many search marketers do not know how to properly set up Adwords Placements. They will often mix keywords and placements in the same campaign, and just use Google’s suggestion tool to identify placements.

Ideally you should have your placements in a separate campaign which will give you much more control.

With a keyword-focused campaign, the click-through-rate on your ads plays an important role in your quality score, which determines how much you pay per click. However Google says that the CTR on your placements will not affect your quality score, so most people don’t worry about low CTR on placements.

If you are doing this you could be missing out on a big opportunity. Because Google Adwords allows you to pay per click (CPC) or pay per thousand impressions (CPM). If you select CPM, then you need to get the best click-through-rate to ensure you are not wasting useless impressions.

Now here is where it gets interesting.

If you can target your ads to appear on the top 10 or 20 sites for the keywords you are interested in, then you can create a very focused placement campaign.

Now there is a way you can do this manually. You can take your keyword list and for each keyword find out what the top 10 ranked sites are and see whether they display Google Ads or not. As you can imagine if you have a big list of keywords this could take several hours or even days.

Now I recently came across some new Adwords software called Placement Locator which can help you do this job much faster.

When I first got an email from Armand Morin about his new software back in January showing how you could dominate all the top ranking pages with your own Google Ad, I thought this must be hype and I deleted the email, however in the back of my mind I know Armand creates good software and so when I got a second email from him a few days ago I decided to buy it and try it out.

Here is How Placement Locator Works

1) You create a keyword list for your campaign.
2) You plug in the keywords to Placement Locator and click start.
3) For each keyword, Placement Locator searches Google, Yahoo and MSN and pulls back a list of top 10 sites which display Adwords Ads.
4) You set up a Placement-targeted ad campaign in Adwords and use these URLs as your placement sites.

I just used Placement Locator to get placements for 45 keywords in about 60 minutes. It found me 110 laser targeted sites which I then set up a specific placement campaign for and now have my Ad appearing on all the top ranked sites which display Adsense when I search for one of the keywords in my placement campaign.

What about Google’s Placement Suggestion Tool?
Good question. Google can suggest placements but will only show the top level domain, not specific pages. Therefore your ad might appear on any page on that domain and the relevancy might be diluted, meaning a lower click-through rate.

Now if you set up a CPM campaign (rather than a CPC campaign) you are only going to pay for impressions which appear in the top 10 ranked search results, and they therefore only appear on those sites which people are likely to look at having searched for one of your keywords.

Now say someone looks at 3 or 4 of the top 10 results and your ad appears on each of those sites, then there is a much higher chance that person will click on your ad since they will see it multiple times. You be able to get a much higher click-through than if you let Google determine which sites to place your ad on.

To see a video on how this software works click here.

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