Breaking out the GDN or Content Network is important, but why? Hint: It’s not about budget. I know, another post about making sure your account is structured correctly. But I promise, I really only write something if I feel I can add value or feel like something could be explained better.

So that being said, we can lay down the rules that we already know we should separate GDN(Content) and Search, because of a few reasons:

They don’t perform the same – CPAs, CTR, Quality Score etc are all different.
We want to have separate budgets to have more control over where our $$$ is spent.
They are targeting different audiences at different stages in the buying cycle.
Because everybody says we should.

OK, so the last one isn’t really valid, but you get the point.

There is another reason though that I have never really heard anybody talk or write about, which is keywords. When I speak about keywords there are a couple of different reasons why they should be at the heart of why we separate the Search and Display Network. If you run mixed campaigns answer these questions for me:

• Can you tell which keywords are triggering your ads on the content network?
• Can you see how your QS varies between search and display?
• What about conversions, how do you know if the CPA for that keyword is because of search or display?

The answer is you can’t or at least not easily!

Don’t believe me? Well, today as I was going through a client AdWords account audit I came across some mixed campaigns.