The objective of any pay per click campaign is to get the best value for your money. With so many levers it’s easy to get lost in the data however, one of the most important metrics to analyze is ad position. Ad position is the measurement of where your ad is showing up on the Google Search Engine Results Page and it can affect your performance dramatically. To pull stats by ad position, you can use the Top vs. Side Segment in AdWords.
Google SERP Top vs. Side ads-Top is the top of the page, other is on the side or bottom of the SERP
To illustrate the effect of positioning on ad performance I’ve pulled data from 2011 for my campaigns. Brand terms were excluded because generally, brand terms are going to be in a high position with a high CTR and low CPC which would skew the data for non-brand terms.
The most impressive difference between the two groups is the CTR which is 9.37% higher when ads appear at the top of the page instead of in other ad positions. However, the average CPC for the ads in the top position is actually $.01 less than its other counterparts which disproves the theory that clicks in higher positions are more expensive than other ad positions. This means, in higher positioning you could potentially get more clicks at a lower cost per click than if you bid lower to try and reduce costs.
Once you have assessed the performance of your campaign using the Top vs. Side segment there are several optimizations available to increase your ad positioning in Google AdWords. The first is to improve your keyword Quality Score. Quality score is used by AdWords to assess how relevant your ads are to the end user and it directly affects your CPC and ad positioning. You’ll notice in the campaign data that the Quality Score for the Top is .2 higher than the Quality Score of the Other.
The second way to improve ad positioning is to increase your bid. Bid and Quality Score work together to determine an ad’s position. If you are seeing that you have keywords with the status “Below First Page Bid” you will want to increase their bids to give them a chance to be shown during searches. You can easily identify these keywords by creating a filter in the keyword tab.
For more tips on improving ad position you can use this Tips for Success guide.
Happy optimizing!
