Reach and Frequency Reports with CPC Site Targeting

March 14, 2007 – 12:07 pm

It wasn’t my birthday and I am no Jesus BUT today the three wise-men (or wise-women, if you are into that whole “equality” thing) came to me and delivered me gifts of Frequency, Reach & Site Level CPC.

When I first logged into my account this morning to run some custom reports, I noticed that there was a NEW report – The Reach and Frequency Report.

adwords reach frequency report
I gasped – it was every little girl or boy’s dream – a new AdWords report to play with. A report that gives me audience reach per site as well as this audience’s frequency of visit (i.e. you can gauge UU).

Why is this Reach and Frequency significant?

Well for one, it signals Google becoming slightly more transparent. This is now the second time recently Google has given a bit of clarity – the first being the quality score column in the AdWords UI. Sure, they aren’t opening up the robe and letting us gaze at the intricate details that make up Google’s voluptuous body [search network]. However, they are giving us enough to keep us happy and stop complaining while we chew and use this new data.

The second significance is that the data IS useful for both monitoring traffic/site quality AND cost per conversion. I see UU playing a larger role now that you can effectively bid per unique.

Unfortunately, I am unable to pull any current information (yet) – I will look forward to a fully populated data set!

The next big thing I witnessed (about an hour or two later) was a message on my dashboard stating that I could now bid CPC on my site targeted campaigns.

adwords cost per click site targeting

Apparently Google is trying to get me in bed… TWO GIFTS IN ONE DAY?!?!? Please, my wife doesn’t pay this much [positive] attention to me. The idea of the new program is as clear as the name – you can now (finally!!) bid per click on site targeting

Why is CPC bidding on site targeting significant?

  1. see: Why CPC advertising is a preferred advertising model?
  2. Because not everyone that wants to target websites for advertising is a brand advertiser
  3. Because some of us have great banner (image) ads with high CTR that could, potentially, displace the ridiculously high CPM bidder if CTR and CPC were taken into account.
  4. Because if you tie this new feature with the Reach and Frequency Report then you are able to control your acquisition cost and conversions on the contextual network down to the source UU. Yeah… I know… who the hell cares about that? That’s about as useful as a donut at bikini carwash.

Today, started off on the right foot – two new gifts from Google. I am already in the process of putting them to full use. Honestly… these gifts were about 40 times better than the damned mini-refrigerator. Though, who am I kidding? Having a tiny refrig filled with malt liquor and beef jerky in an office environment is classy.