Running a Google placement campaign can be an exercise in …oblique-ness.  But you can sidestep all the aggravations of Placement-targeted Campaigns when you use them to test and tweak your creative messaging.

A little background on Google Placement-targeted campaigns:

1. Ads — both text and image — appear in the Google content network
2. The ads appear only on specific web sits that you select…or a subset of a website (such as a selection of pages from that site), or even an individual ad unit located on a single page.
3. Unlike ads that appear as automatic placements on the Content Network, you have control over these placements with bids

I found running and analyzing Placement Campaigns to be difficult. You cannot gauge whether your bids are ensuring that your placements are getting best placement, and it is difficult to analyze what placements are working — and why.

Although Google likes to tell ad managers that the Placement-targeted campaigns give you more control over how and where the placements appear — this is not necessarily so. The bidding process is very obscured by the system — there is no way to tell if the bids are getting your placements high enough to get sufficient visibility. Or…if you are paying too much for the placements. To make it even more complex when analyzing a campaign — a placement can be set up in multiple sizes (tile, leaderboard, ect), and results can vary wildly on the same web page, depending on the size and creative message of the placement.

The solution: don’t include placement campaign in your branding or banner campaign tools.

Instead, use Google’s placement campaigns as a laboratory to test the messaging and sizes of your creatives. If you have a client who wants to try out multiple messaging, then feel free to explore in Google-land. You can control where the placements are placed, so it will give you a clue about what web sites will work for the right messages.

So for example, if you want to test if a “10% Off” coupon or a “Buy One, Get One Free” offer will work in a Power Mommy blog site…then set up a test. Run both placements in all the Power Mommy blog sites in the network…alternating one day with the 10% offer and the BOGO offer on another day. Then, analyze the results after two weeks.

Voila!

You have figured out what works with this demographic niche — and what publishing media works with this message.