Does your Adwords advert perform better when it’s at position 3 than position 6? Do you always want the top spot? That’s what ‘position preference’ is for – it’s a little feature that you turn on and off at campaign level so you can choose a range of positions you’d prefer your advert to show in.
So far so good. What baffles me is the negative effect position preference has on the ad’s performance.
An old client of mine wanted to spend a bit less on his Adwords since no-one’s buying much at the moment, but wanted his ads to keep showing. With his current bids he averaged position 1-2, so I set his position preference at 4-5. The idea was that his ads would show lower down the page and therefore gather less clicks.
He rang me this morning thinking he’d done something to his account and accidentally turned his ads off. I did a few searched and they appeared nowhere in the search results. Imagine my surprise when I had a look in his account and saw the error message to the left.
Now, his bids were exactly the same as before, but I wanted the ads to show lower. Surely by the Laws of Adwords this meant clicks would cost less? After all, the quality score would remain the same….right? So the maximum bid would get position 4-5 at least some of the time – I don’t see any excuse for the adverts to be turned off.
I know that a lot of factors could come into play here – a changed quality score, different bidding by competitors, etc etc, but what makes me think it’s a load of bullsh*t is when I turned position preference off:
The ads started showing again in position 1. Obviously nothing wrong with the bid then!
The trouble with Adwords, and I’ve said it before, is that the features allow clashes and bugger-ups, and the error messages are woefully inadequate. For a paid service I think it’s pretty unforgiveable – it’s got to the point when you need to hire an expert to manage it not because it’s inherently complicated, but because it’s been made complicated.
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