Survey Results on Google's New 'Content Targeted' Ads: Low Clicks, Iffy Conversions.

More than 100,000 marketers pay for ads on Google now, which may make it the biggest online media seller in terms of accounts.

Over the past three weeks, many MarketingSherpa readers have written in to share their results with Google's new ad option -- so-called Content Targeted campaigns. We started to notice a discrepancy between the rave reviews Google's PR gave itself, and the actual data we got from users.

So, last week we sent out a survey, interviewed experts and collected data for this Special Report. Hope you find it useful!

1. Quick backgrounder on Google's New Ad Option 2. Survey Results: Click rates 3. Conversion rates 4. Sherpa's recommendations for your campaigns 5. Watch out: Google Uses Opt-out 6. Research notes & useful links

-> 1. Quick backgrounder on Google's New Ad Option

On February 26th, Google let its AdWords advertisers know that they would be automatically getting extra ads on a new service - 'Content Targeted Advertising' at no cost until March 12th.

Everyone could try it out, and if they didn't like it, cancel that part of their account. If they did like results, they would keep on getting these extra ads but at the regular cost (based on what they paid for clicks in the search ads system.)

The concept of putting ads next to related content isn't new. It's called contextual advertising.

Plenty of other companies, including Lee Enterprises, CMP's TechWeb network, YellowBrix, and even Google's competitor Overture, offer some form of contextual advertising against editorial content.

Historically, in general contextually-placed ads have gotten better click results than ads that were placed in other ways such as general run-of-site or run-of-network. Few people can speak to whether these clicks wound up with better conversions or not, because most marketers weren't counting conversions until fairly recently.

Also, much anecdotal evidence in MarketingSherpa Case Studies reveals that text-based ads are winning over basic graphical ads online. Broadly speaking, unless your graphical ad sings and dances to attract attention (ie, rich media), you're probably better off with text.

Taken together these two points -- contextually served ads work and text-ads work -- would indicate that Google's new Targeted Content Program would be a success ... as long as they could be sure ads really matched the content …