It’s not really new news, but last week I had the chance to use the Adwords position bidding preference tool in Google.
At first I thought, “Weee, this is going to make this campaign so much easier to run! I love automation.” The next day I checked my traffic – nothing had really happened. As would be expected, this concerned me.
So I dug a bit deeper and discovered (after hovering over my keywords) that my ads were not, in fact, running at all for those keywords. Muchos perturbed was I. Why would this happen? It says it’s automated.
More digging ensued and I discovered that the “automatic” part only applies if you are bidding high or low enough to be in the positions you specified. I’m not sure about you, but that doesn’t really sound automatic to me.
Strategising for first place. Image Credit: Volusion
I got over my annoyance and increased all of the CPCs as necessary (yes, I wanted to be at the top). But then I found another time-consuming task of having to find out IF my keywords were showing, despite the increase in CPC. Thankfully, I then rediscovered the Adwords Ads diagnostic tool. This little baby tells you if your ads are showing, how many of them aren’t and what the errors are that are causing your ads not to show. Yes, major time save.
I had to figure out why my ads weren’t showing though – despite becoming enamored with the diagnostic tool and wanting to spend more time with it.
As it turns out, what the position preference tool does is show your ad in the positions that you have specified. BUT, if your ad can’t be shown in those positions then it will not show at all. This could happen because your bid may be too high or low or your quality score is too low to allow you to rank in the position that you want.
This means that if you want to be in position one to three you need to be bidding high enough to get into those positions. On the other side of the scale, if you want to be in positions four to six, you need to be bidding low enough to be in those positions. So I had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the position bidding not actually being automatic. I did some research and came to the conclusion that it really is a good tool, despite some warnings. The warnings include:
- Higher cost if you want to be in the higher positions.
- The higher positions generally pick up more researchers than buyers.
- People click through the top ads before making a decision and there is no guarantee that your ad will be the decision causer.
But good points are:
- If you want to attract traffic, this is a good way to do it.
- If you have better converting positions you can target those.
- It is good for a branding strategy too.
So basically you can use it to open up your campaign, to target your best converting positions or to get your brand name out there. If you find that your conversions mostly occur between positions two and four then you can set your position preference to just that. You’d need to take into consideration the cost per acquisition, and determine if any increase in the CPC is worth it.
A word from Google on the position preference: “Position preference does not mean that your ad will always appear in the position you specify. The usual AdWords ranking and relevance rules apply. If your ad doesn't qualify for position #1, setting a position preference of one will not move it there. Position preference simply means AdWords will try to show your ad whenever it is ranked in your preferred position, and to avoid showing it when it is not.”
If only I had seen that right from the start. We live and learn!
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