When advertising with Google Adwords, I always exclude the Content Network to minimize click fraud. As an Adsense publisher, I’m well aware of webmasters who click on Google ads or use bots to make more money.

How serious is the click fraud problem? According to the Click Fraud Network, 26% of clicks on the Content Network are non-genuine. This is a serious problem with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and not surprisingly, both Google and Yahoo are working hard to address it.

Now, site targeting is a different ball game.

Google Adwords site targeting lets you pick websites on their Content Network that you want your ads to show on. So instead of allowing Google to pick the websites for you based on contextual (a.k.a. content-matching) technology, you can now manually pick “quality” websites.

Site-targeted campaigns are created in almost the same way as you would a keyword-targeted campaign. The difference is an extra step that lets you select the sites manually - see picture (opens in a new window). Refer to Google’s user guide for more information.

The downside of Google’s site-targeted ads? It’s priced on cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis, much like banner ads. Hence, they tend to have a far lower click-through rate (CTR) and advertising on a high-traffic website can cause your budget to run out quickly.

I ran 2 campaigns (keyword-targeted and site-targeted) for comparison and the results were expected i.e. the site-targeted campaign received lower click-throughs, cost more per click and ran out of budget far quicker.

1) Keyword-Targeted:
- CTR = 5.33%
- Avg. CPC = $0.76

2) Site-Targeted:
- CTR = 0.05%
- Avg. CPC = $2.00

View a screenshot of the Google Adwords campaigns.

In summary, site targeting is a step-up from blindly advertising on Google’s Content Network but the CPM model is a big let-down, though there are rumors that Google will launch a CPC version soon. In the meantime, site-targeted ads are probably more suitable for brand awareness than for generating sales leads. Still, there are others who have come up with creative ways to generate a higher CTR like Tim Schroeder ;)