Adwords Position Preference: Beware

October 15, 2008

There are always new features to help manage PPC campaigns and often they look like they will make life easier. That said, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will actually manage your campaign any more effectively than you can. Adwords position preference is an application that definitely isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!

Just Search does not advise PPC ads to be positioned in 1st or 2nd place; often these positions pickup more surfers and researchers than buyers and can result in higher costs and few (expensive) conversions. People often flick through the top few ads before actually deciding where to buy what they were looking for. In most industries position three and four result in the most effective PPC campaigns.

As I would normally like my ads to be positioned in specific places on the page the positioning preference tool seemed like a great tool to use. The results however were not just disappointing but in many cases ads totally stopped showing!

What happened is that CPC’s had increased so that the bid was no longer enough to get the position I had elected. The main thing to note when using position preference is not to put a bottom limit on as you cannot predict changes in the average CPC and therefore at least even if your position drops your ads will show somewhere on the page.

What the position preference does is instruct Adwords to show your ad in the positions that you have elected. If your ad cannot be shown in those positions e.g. 4-6 then it will not show at all. Other factors that may affect positioning preference are that your bid may be too high or low and another that your quality score is too low to gain the position that you wish to achieve.

If you do wish to use the position preference application make sure you open up the number of positions so that there is room for movement in case you do not meet the criteria for a couple of positions. If in doubt always bid higher to have more chance of gaining the position. Also ensure that your keywords have already developed a good quality score as this will increase the likely hood of gaining the position.

Tanase Rivers

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1 Comment

  1. Nice blog. I have had this problem before as well.

    I question the value of this tool, I think it is more useful to set the average CPC you wish to pay for keywords or use the new CPA bidding tool. Also you can never guarantee a position, for example an ad that has been #1 for a long time with a sky high quality score is going to be very hard to shift from top position.

    Comment by Steve Thompson October 16, 2008 @ 3:51 pm

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