Everyone seems to be afraid of the content network because of the rumours going around about how hard it is to get a successful campaign going. This post is on my experience so it will be different to the usual “content is a goldmine” posts you will have read before.

Don’t get me wrong, I have seen massive potential in the content network, it’s just that the few campaigns I’ve recently launched didn’t seem to take off due to lacking volume. I’m having a final attempt at it today as I finalised another campaign (which is built better in my opinion ) so I can see how that goes. If it does flop I will come back to it at a later day when I have some more experience.

I don’t have a great deal of tips to give out but I will list everything that I have read and put into action to try and improve the outcome – you may learn something, you might not:

• Group your ad groups by theme, I generally try to get at least 10-15 keywords that are all related to get your ad on the most suited sites (more won’t hurt)
• Your ads need to stand out, remember you are interrupting people from the content they are reading. I know the blog stories are doing well in almost any niche hint hint
• Don’t be alarmed about a low CTR. 0.10% is good, anything over 0.25% is great and if you can manage anything over 0.50% you are doing something right
• Pay attention to your bids, if you lose money in the first day slash them across the whole campaign and see what happens the next day
• Track the referrers, your keywords are irrelevant to a certain extent in the content network, you will want to create placement targeted campaigns down the line where you can state which sites your ad will appear on – you just need to find the sites that are sending you conversions

Regarding that last point, if you are having trouble tracking things like that then I strongly suggest you use prosper202 or at least tracking202.