Google Adwords Managed Placements

This Google Managed Placements Guide is part of our Google Adwords Guides for Google Adwords Help & Management

Introduction

Placements are locations on a content discovery network where your ads can appear. A placement can be an entire website, a sub-set of a website or an individual ad unit within a specific page. Placements give your ads an opportunity to reach a much larger audience. The application provides the tools to manage placements effectively.

Our application supports managed and automatic placements. Currently, managed placements are supported for the Google Display Network only.

Managed Placements

Specific placements that can be managed separately for increased control. Use managed placements to increase bids on top performing sites. Alternatively, use managed placements to lower bids for under performing sites. Managed placements also allow the user to specify a unique destination URL.

Where To Find Managed Placements

Managed placements can be found by navigating to the main Placements tab, which automatically defaults to the Managed Placements sub-tab.

Managed placements act like keywords in the sense that they can have a URL that the ad will serve. When this ad is clicked or gains a conversion, it will use the managed placement’s URL and attribute to both the managed placement and the creative.

Automatic Placements

Publisher uses contextual targeting to determine where ads are shown. Contextual targeting is based on the keywords in the group. Bids for automatic placements are based on the group content bid.

Where to find Automatic Placements

We suggest using the Placement Report to determine where automatic placement ads are displaying within the content network. Websites where ads are being displayed frequently can be moved into Managed Placements for increased control and visibility. The Placement Report can be found if you click on the Placements tab, and then click the Placement Report tab. From here you can add Automatic Placement URLs to your Managed Placements.

Keywords do not gain conversions when dealing with placements, but both keyword planners and creative-level tracking can still be used.

For those using keyword-level tracking: A content group can contain keywords with URLs and when an ad is clicked/gains a conversion, the ad will serve the keyword URL but only attribute to the creative by matching the Pub ID to the {creative} value in the URL.

Where to find Automatic Placements Performance Data

The performance data for Automatic Placements is currently included in the Application’s grey content bar. One of the places to find this is by clicking into a specific Group, then clicking the Keywords sub-tab. Make sure you are also clicking to view all keywords. This link can be found in the bottom-left corner of the grid. The Automatic Placement data will show up here within a grey content bar. This content bar shows an overall collection of data for the Automatic Placements at the group-level. Because there is no way to see Automatic Placement data at the keyword-level, this can only be seen at the creative-level and the group-level via the Content bar.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why Can I Not Edit Content Bids For Individual Keyword Placements?

The content bid is set at the group level. So if you want to decrease the content bids for placements without an individual max CPC (e.g. max CPC = 0), you need to decrease the Max Content CPC value in its parent group and not the individual max CPC of a keyword placement.

Does Google Use The Max Bids For Most Placements Now? Or The Content Bid?

For managed placements with individual max CPC values, Google will use the individual max CPC values of the placement and not its parent group max CPC. For managed placements without an individual max CPC, Google will use the group content max CPC. Likewise, for automatic placements, Google will use the group content max CPC.

How Can I View Keywords For The Google Display Network In The Platform And Report On These Objects?

The platform currently does not have a feature to bring down and report on keyword data from the Google Display Network.

I Post My Placements To Google But I Am Able To See Them Go Live Only After Clicking “Enable Custom Bids” In Google’s UI For Each Placement. Is There A Feature In The Platform That Lets Us Bypass This “Enabling” Step?

This new “enabling” step for placements in Google’s UI is a new Google feature and not yet supported in the platform. Please contact your customer service representative, if you have any questions on future support for this.