AdWords B2B Newsletter Content Advertising Advice

Google recently launched an AdWords Technology Business to Business Newsletter. It's good that they're paying attention to B2B advertisers. This inaugural edition has some interesting advice about the content network:

• Create a separate campaign for the ads you want to place on the content network. This way, you can allocate your budget and test out new ideas without affecting your search campaigns. If you’d rather run on the search or content only, you can easily edit your campaign settings.
• Users on the content network are mainly browsing rather than searching, so it’s important to grab their attention with sharp and compelling ad text that reflects your keyword list. Include a call to action like “Start your free trial today!” or “Learn about our solutions!”

This advice conflicts with the AdWords Learning Center answer to the "Should I Write Different Ads For Search and Content?" question:

It is not necessary to write unique ads for search and content properties. Google's technology matches ads to relevant themes and monitors the performance of all ads on content pages. Effective text ads that are matched to relevant content will draw clicks wherever they appear.

This is bad advice. The B2B newsletter advice is better. I've been suggesting for a couple of years now that it's a useful strategy to separate search advertising from contextual advertising (see 8/1/05 Search Engine Guide article or updated version for more details). Good to see Google offer similar advice. While it is possible to re-purpose the same keyword ad for the content network that is used for the search network, it's not advisable.

Tags (byo w/ TagBuildr): business, b2b, btob, google adwords, content network, contextual advertising, search engine marketing