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The content networks, especially Google's contextual network, have made a dramatic turn for the better in recent months. Google's content network has been around for a while and most search marketers have at least tested it, possibly even found a few ad groups here and there that have been effective, but for the most part the content network has not been a big part of an advertisers online media spend or source of new business... Until Now!

Things are definitely changing...

We have both lead generation and ecommerce clients driving significant new business through Google's Content Network, and that's right I said ecommerce. For the savviest of marketers they have known for months now that the content network was much improved but most of the documented success was for lead gen. However in recent months our ecommerce clients have started to see vast improvements to a point where some product categories have a greater ROAI on the content network as compared to search.

So what happened, well here are 4 reasons your content should of improved dramatically as of late:

(1) Transparency. In years past, even just a few months ago, there was virtually zero transparency into the placements on the contextual network. However that has changed with the introduction of the PPR reports in Google. Now you can easily identify all the sites that drove impressions, clicks and sales. Also you are able to see the cost per click for each of the websites. Most of us realize that Google offered something called "Smart Pricing", which is basically a reduction of the cost per click based on the website you are displayed on. Higher rated sites have a higher associated CPC and those that are rated lower are reduced to a lower cost per click without having to change your max bid.

(2) Empowerment. Not only does Google provide you this transparency but you are now empowered as an advertiser to do something with the data. Google offers the ability to either exclude an under performing website or to actually try and attract more traffic from a converting website through site targeting. Site targeting allows you to dominate the ad space for a targeted website. Just think, what if you were able to occupy all the space on a search results page for your best keywords... well, in essence that is the power of site targeting. Going back to the exclude feature, can imaging running broad match without the ability to add negative keywords?

(3) Optimization of the Clickable Space- Many wondered how many of the clicks received from the content networks were intentional considering the fact that the background was click able, possible (actually likely) causing unintentional clicks that you as an advertiser paid for. In late October/early November the clickable space was minimized, which lessened the probability of an advertiser receiving and unintentional click.

(4) Enhanced Targeting (Evolved Algorithm) - Contextual has evolved beyond "Turning on Content" for an adgroup of keywords, though the feature still exists, it is rarely used and not even a recommended best practice from Google themselves. The reason for this is that contextual is more about developing "themes" or a "target market". Consider this, at our age agency, we represent a dating service, and the top performing content ad group is focused exclusively on divorce, even though divorce search terms had a miserable ROI. The Google algorithm for mapping advertisers to specific pages has improved resulting in a better return for the advertisers.

When developing your 2008 budgets, make a little room for content. Do it right and you won't be disappointed. For mre insights visit my Internet Marketing Blog.