Google Site Targetting – the first ten days

Google launched its site targetting service for adwords 10 days ago, so how well is it working?
Is it having a tangible impact?
Web marketing has the distinct advantage over print media in that you can track a campaign’s effectiveness with a high degree of accuracy.
Banner displays > visitor clicks > visitor buys (or not)
Even before the advent of advanced web log analysers and Google’s own conversion tracking service it was possible to follow the trail.
The problem with the non-targetted ads was that you did not really know which sites were displaying your ads unless you came across them yourself, or to put it another way, you did not have full control over your inventory.
Although there is no doubt in my mind that adwords do work maintaining some level of control over where my ads appear is important.
So how does the targetting work out?
The overall answer is “very well”. I can decide exactly which sites I want our ads to appear on. No longer am I at the mercy of the site’s content (or Google’s interpretation of it). If I want an ad to appear on a news site I simply choose the site and place my bid. I then have some level of guarantee that my ads will appear.
So how about actual sales?
This is an area I find a little unclear. Of course I can see sales as we make them, but the actual conversion ratio is not as clear.
With the standard adwords campaigns you have quite a bit of detail in relation to coversions including, and this is the key, the actual cost per conversion.
With the targetted ads you get a conversion rate, but not an actual cost. The interesting thing is that the rate itself wasn’t displaying until a couple of days ago, so maybe this is an area that Google is still working on.
What are the tangible advantages?
Having control over where ads appear, as opposed to running a campaign based on the aspiration that the keywords/phrases would match with relevant content for your target market/audience.
Can it save you money?
I would think that it can.
A lot of websitest that sell advertising inventory set quite high CPM with rates in excess of €8 CPM being the norm, whereas with Google I’ve never seen anything above €3 CPM.
I guess only with time will we be able to accurately judge how effective a solution it really is, but one thing is for sure it will have an impact on how people’s online marketing spend is divied up in the future.
Why would you pay €10 CPM for a site, when you could get your ads on there for a fraction of the price via Google?
Why would you trust unaudited statistics when you can accurately track your stats via the Google interface?