Use Google AdWords & AdSense Distribution Data to Broker Direct Ad Deals

Via Marketing Pilgrim, Google now offers a Placement Performance report, which shows what pages and sites your content ads are displayed on, and which ones are converting. Here are tips Google offers on how to use this data:

• If your goal is to increase conversions such as purchases, page views, sign-ups or leads through your ads, reassess how you're tracking your conversions. Make sure you've implemented conversion tracking so you can understand how individual sites are converting for you. Please note: A low CTR reading on a site does not mean your ads are not performing well. This is because users behave differently on content pages than they do on search sites.

• Use the site exclusion tool to exclude sites that are not converting for your campaign.
  Refine your targeting. If you find that your ads are not showing up on sites with a particular theme that you do not find relevant, try using negative keywords

• Adjust your bids. Enabling our content bidding feature will allow you to bid separately for the content network. Learn more.
• Identify sites that are converting particularly well for your campaign and take steps to increase your exposure on those sites. We recommend enabling our content bidding feature to bid more aggressively on those sites, or targeting them through a site-targeted campaign. Please note that site targeting utilizes cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding.

While those tips generally revolve around track your ads and spend more, they could be a bit more altruistic and useful. Thus, here are my tips on how I might use the data:

• If you are using CPM site targeting on a large site, but find only a few pages convert, consider just targeting those few pages.

• Find sources to buy ads from directly, and buy all their ad inventory. Maybe you can even broker a custom ad deal involving presell pages.
• Find link sources...if they are already selling AdSense it doesn't take much more work to buy ads directly, especially if they are a smaller player and are not making much from AdSense.
• View what TYPES of content converts and search for other content that matches that intent which you may want to advertise on.
• View page content to see what keyword phrases the converting content covers. Create content covering the same keyword groups.