I remember years ago, a check box in the content network was a good sign that an Adwords advertiser was a novice. You would simply be throwing away precious budget resources relying on this advertiser, because there was absolutely no accountability on Google’s end as to where your money was going. An advertiser could not see what sites their ad showed up on, and they couldn’t block individual sites from being part of their marketing efforts. This caused a huge deficiency in the ability to optimize. It was an all-or-nothing shot at a huge part of Google’s available services. And for professional advertisers, the decision was nothing. When we would take control of a new account we would almost always opt out of the content network altogether. We saw the content network as a fool’s bet. This has all changed, however, and I can strongly speculate why.

Google’s content network is the largest network of its kind. All the website owners who have opted into Adsense make up the content network. Because of the past lack of transparency, Google has strong competitors in this particular field. There have been a handful of networks that have had the competitive opportunity to sprout up over the years, including Adbrite, Adsonar, advertising.com, and Bidvertiser. These sites provide an affordable alternative to Google’s content network. These networks are essentially offering the control, accountability, and transparency that the content network never offered before. Adwords is now making their content network more accountable than it used to be. This is probably because they were losing their market share to these other ad networks.

Google is taking a cue from Yahoo! to fix the obvious price differences between the content network and the competing networks. They offer a CPC discount on sites that have a lower aggregated conversion rate. Based on their conversion information, a site with a bad conversion reputation will receive a discounted CPC.

It isn’t perfect yet, but Google now provides a round about way to drill down on the content network. You would run a placement report to see the conversion value of each site on the content network and then use the site exclusion tool to block that site from the content network in the future.

Expect to see further improvements on Google’s end for accountability, transparency, and optimization of the content network. I can further speculate that the reason behind this is to put the other guys out of business. As always, regardless of the political or competitive implications, Google’s improvements increase ROI for the advertiser, and enhance the user experience for people who search the Internet.