You can usually get away with paying a lower CPC on the content network (where your ads appear on publisher sites that use AdSense) than you can in the sponsored listings in Google search results. However, the type of visitor is different, and a search result visitor might be more valuable to you. So if your question is why bother spending a higher CPC reaching the sponsored results when you could be spending less to reach the same number of visitors in the content network, the answer is that it sometimes may be necessary.

Sponsored listings visitors are actively looking for you while content network visitors are passively looking for you. This means that when someone does a Google search for something in particular, and they find your AdWords ad, you're exactly what they were searching for. They're going to spend a long time on your site and the conversion rate is going to be fairly high.

But when a particular visitor is on some site that has AdSense and your ad just so happens to catch their eye and they click on it, they aren't *actively* and specifically looking for just what you have to offer ... you just happened to be there while they were off doing something else, so you really only have half their ear. Therefore, getting a conversion out of this visitor might be significantly harder.

i agree with the queen of daniweb. the value of a search click tends to be higher than on the publisher network. by default, google and yahoo will serve ads to both when creating new campaigns. its generally a good idea to run your search and content campaigns separately, since both channels are very different from each other. an easy way to do so with google, is to download the adwords desktop editor - copy the campaign - and check one off for search, and the other for content network. this way you can easily manage both separately, without having to manually re-enter your keywords and rewrite your creatives.

Thanks for your replies. I was also thinking in the same way but was not deciding it. Now done