I have been running an adwords campaign for about a week now and the vast majority of impressions and clicks (and the cost to me) are coming from the content displayed ads. I'm wondering if the search listings are more targeted and therefore have a better conversion rate. Anybody have experience with this? Running just the search ads will keep the cost down but will also reduce traffic, but they might be better quality clicks than just happening to catch someones attention in a content ad. At least in the search listing they are searching for what I'm selling.

Any thoughts?

Oops, wrong forum I just saw the pay-per-click forum, i'll repost this there, but feel free to respond here if you want to.

The content network includes every site out there that's running Adsense. It's overrun with click fraud and I highly recomend not using it. Do a side by side test - you'll see what I mean.

You are right search ads are likely to get you more quality clicks even though the clicks will be fewer

I have not had very good luck with the content network so far. I am not sure exactly why. If someone could explain why clicks from the content network don't turn into conversions, while search clicks are more likely to turn into conversions I'd love to hear it. This is something I have been thinking about lately.