For Content Network advertisers, placement reports were a God-send when they were first released, finally providing visibility into where Google was placing your ads. Since then, they’ve added some awesome site-exclusion capabilities, allowing you to block your ads from showing on everything from image sharing websites to parked domains and forums.

Here’s what I think are the most important reasons to run a placement report at least twice a month on your content-only campaigns:

• Get rid of sites sending you garbage traffic. This used to be just MFA sites, but now includes the social networking sites we’ve all come to realize aren’t exactly a gold-mine…
• Get rid of irrelevant sites ruining your overall campaign CTR and Quality Score. Tens of thousands of impressions or more and no clicks? Gun them.
• Find out which sites have the best-converting traffic. Check those sites out and then bid on their domain name as a search keyword:)
• Get ideas for negative keywords. Look at the worst of the worst in terms of irrelevant traffic on your placement report and check the sites out. Try to see what keywords might have caused Google to mistakenly place you there. Once you see how it could have happened, turn those words or phrases into campaign-wide negatives.

One great way to sort and analyze a placement report is like this:

1. Sort the entire report by the ‘clicks’ column. This way you’ll see what sites send you the most clicks and be able to quickly evaluate if there’s a serious dud in the mix, toileting your conversion rate.
2. Next, sort by the number of conversions. Sorting by conversion rate won’t be that helpful as many sites have 100% conversion rates based on 1-hit, 1-sale. Get an idea of which sites are sending the money traffic, look at the adgroup that’s putting your ad there, and bid up to make sure you stay on that site.
3. Now, sort by impressions. Look for sites sending TONS of traffic with no clicks or conversions. Add these to your campaign negative sites to ensure they don’t ruin your campaign’s overall CTR

How do you use your placement reports?