Example Blogs

Today’s media buying strategies have become complex. Opaque campaign types and audience targeting strategies obscure the actual media that is being purchased. Post-click performance analysis is the default way of interpreting media quality. There is validity to this but it must be balanced against a first principles approach: we must buy good quality media to be successful.

Today’s media buying strategies have become complex. Opaque campaign types and audience targeting strategies obscure the actual media that is being purchased. Post-click performance analysis is the default way of interpreting media quality. There is validity to this but it must be balanced against a first principles approach: we must buy good quality media to be successful.

Let’s describe this further, using Google Ads as our example platform. Supposing we have a lead generation objective. We run a Google Display campaign and build reasonable audience targets using features like demographics targeting, in-market audience data, and so on. We see our campaign is generating leads at a $10 CPA. Our post-click analysis shows this campaign to be a success.

However, when we review the actual placements report, the report that shows where the ads actually appeared, we see that most of the placements and conversions are from junk media on mobile apps, made-for-ads websites, and so on. We conclude that our leads must be junk, regardless of what the analytics platforms may report. There is no way that ads running on funny-kids-games-info.xyz have converted quality B2B SaaS leads. We have failed to buy quality media.

Google Search Partner’s Network

Another Google Ads example is search query analysis, and distinguishing between Google Search itself and the Google Search Partners Network. Google’s Search Partners network has come under heavy scrutiny lately. There is no transparency on what websites actually constitute the Search Partners placement. Therefore it is hard to believe that the underlying media is high quality. (Google SP is not the only media platform where some part of the distribution is opaque: this is an issue in Google PMAX campaigns, the Microsoft Advertising Network, LinkedIn’s Audience Network, and so on. A deeper exploration here is the subject for another post.)  

Beyond Search Partners, if your ads are running on Google.com, you have some confidence at a baseline level of media quality. At least the root underlying placement is strong. The next layer of analysis is the search query. This is a commonplace point of Google Ads performance analysis so we will not explain it in great detail. The general point is to review the actual search queries, carefully and line-by-line, and determine if they match your target query that you wanted to buy.

A simple checklist for ensuring quality underlying media in search campaigns might include:

• Ads ran only on Google search
• Ads ran only to your target location
• Search query quality was high
• Audience targeting was applied sensibly
• Ad creative was sensible and matched the query
• Conversion tracking was working
• Bidding was intelligent