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.

Recently I’ve noticed Thomson Local showing up in the search results – much like eBay they seem to be bidding on random goods and services. At first I thought ‘oh that’s good, they’re providing some clicks for their advertisers’. Then I realised that they haven’t quite got the ‘local’ thing worked out yet.

In case you’re wondering, I’m in Harrogate.

Traditional directories like Thomson Local must be struggling at the moment. On the one hand I applaud them for embracing Pay Per Click – it’s something they can offer to keep themselves afloat. On the other hand, their inability to do it properly could be just another nail in the coffin.