Google Adwords has answered the prayers of AdWords advertisers by introducing the Placement Performance Report. The Placement Performance Report will collect and display content ad data that until now has been one of the biggest mysteries to SEM professionals.

For years, content ad data (the data which tells you about your ads on 3rd party publisher websites) has been a well kept secret that only those with a Google business card could access leaving many a search engine marketing professional no choice but not to run content ads due to the lack of measurable data. With the new Placement Performance Report, advertisers will finally be able to measure the ROI of content ads through a variety of metrics.

This new content ad report includes some very familiar metrics to those who use the AdWords system. These common metrics include:

• Campaign and Ad Group
• Clicks
• Impressions
• CTR
• Avg. CPC
• Avg. CPM

In addition, the Placement Performance Report will include some new or redefined metrics exclusive to this new report. Here is a brief description of the new metrics/categories reported in theis new content ad report:

Domain: This column displays the website address where your ad was displayed (i.e. www.betterrecipes.com).

URL: This column displays the specific URL of the domain where your ad was displayed. (i.e. www.betterrecipes.com/dip_recipes.html).

Ad Distribution: The distribution preference you selected for your ads. The column will read either ‘Content’ or ‘Search’ to reflect where your ads were shown in the Google Network.

Contextually Targeted: This column indicates whether your ad was placed on a content page based on contextual targeting.

Site Targeted: For site-targeted campaigns, this column displays the URL of the site where your ad was shown.

Ad Variation: The type of ad you created to run in your campaign (text ad, video ad, flash ad, or image ad).

Google has also released some tips when using the new Placement Performance Report:

• Don’t focus on click-through rate (CTR): Content network CTR doesn’t affect your ad ranking on the search network.
• Think in terms of conversions: You can use Google’s free Conversion Tracking tool to determine whether site performance meets your ROI objectives.
• Consider the site targeting feature: You can increase your exposure on top performing sites.
• Wait for statistically significant data: For sites without much performance data, wait a while before making a final judgment.