If you are experienced / semi-experienced in Adwords, then you would know the difference between these 2 networks. However, I just read from some news that there is a guy suing Google for making his ads displaying on websites that he doesn’t like. He thought not putting in the bid for content ads would automatically opt him out of the content network.
I won’t be surprised if Google wins the case.
In brief:
- Advertising in the search network means allowing the ads to show as the sponsored links of the search result pages. This supports geo-targeting ie. you can choose what country / region to display your ad, and is based on a standard IP table. Only contextual ads are allowed.
- Advertising in the content network means allowing the ads to show on Google’s content network, which is a pool of Google’s partnering sites. You can go through the list of websites and only allow the ads to be shown on the sites that you choose, or exclude the sites that you don’t like etc. You can use contextual ads, banner ads (flash, animated gif or static image), video ads etc.
When you setup an Adwords account, it is always recommended to setup 2 campaigns, one for content network and one for search network. This way you can control the budget spend better as well.
