Last week, Google announced content match bidding. Now advertisers can have a separate max CPC for content network sites.

Before this change, when content match was turned on, Google would select a keyword from each ad group in the campaign and the max CPC for that keyword (usually the same as the max CPC for the ad group) was your content match max CPC. This was rediculious as the content network sites don’t drive nearly as qualified traffic as the search network sites. Since the traffic isn’t as qualified, it is hard to justify spending as much per click in the content network as in the search network and you can’t lower your max CPC without lowering the max CPC on search — at which point you are forced to turn content match off for the entire campaign. Now, I can just lower my max CPC instead of shutting off the advertising and the traffic to my site.

Now that the minimum bid for content match is just $0.01, I can advertise where I wasn’t advertising before. Google has opened up a market that they had eliminated due to the previous high cost of content match advertising. In other words, they have eliminated the price floor and advertising willing to advertise at a lower cost can advertise on publishers’ sites that are willing to rent their space for less. My friend Preston does a good job explaining this economic principle in his blog.

Another problem I always had with the content match was that is was set at the campaign level. Sometimes I would have an ad group that had a good return while another ad group couldn’t produce any sales. Now, though the setting is still at the campaign level, I can bid as low as $0.01 on ad groups that just don’t produce sales. I have no problem spending $0.01 per click on less-qualified traffic because eventually, someone’s going to buy and that purchase will likely come before the cost per conversion is more than the margin on what I’m selling.

I am really excited about this new feature. I’ve had several sales on content match advertising but the clicks were to expensive. Now, I can get those sales at a lower cost and generate more profit.