Has anyone else noticed this? One of my campaigns does extremely well in #3, but Google seems to love sneaking it up to #2 which seems to get its fair share of curiosity clickers, despite my position preferencing. Any ideas on how to circumvent this?
I've only done limited testing with postion preference so far. In my limited tests I just felt like it wasn't "working" like I thought it should. Then I read: "Position preferences are not guaranteed. Your ad may still appear in other positions, though we will make every effort to display your ad where you prefer." What % (estimated) of the time is it putting you in slot two?
Wow, nice pickup. I'd always thought for some reason position preferencing was absolute. From experience though, it seems to be more of a "recommendation" to AdWords. It's showing it in #2 about 30-40% of the time, which is quite bothersome in terms of bid prices. I'm thinking of steadily dropping my bid, but I think the guy I bumped into #4 wants the position back...
I never prefer the 1st . I always set my preference at 2 or 3. In my experience, An user first sees the organic listing and then goes from the 1st organic listing to the top., Which means, He will see in this order 1) 1st organic listing 2) sponsored listing (first he will see the 2nd ad and then the 1st ad) So the 2nd sponsored listing may get more clicks than the first.,
when did they do away with the premium ads on top only? i saw one of my ads up there one day on was shocked. thought you had to have a premium acct with tons of traffic to get those positions.
The type of account you have (what's a premium adwords account?) has nothing to do with the "blue" ads at the top of the page. Those top spots are reserved for the ads with the best quality score. See: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6384
As an update, I burnt through about $200 about 30 minutes after creating this thread so I've settled on 4th at the moment ;p This issue is a real pain in the ass though. It seems to obey position preferences until my ads get into the blue area. Usually this isn't much of a problem except on expensive keywords. Regarding the top positions, that link you sent says it weighs CPC far more heavily (or ignores QS) when factoring into the blue area.
From the link I provided; From here; The big difference for the top positions is that they use a keywords actual cpc instead of the max cpc in the Ad Rank = CPC X Quality Score calculation.
Cheers for that, it confirms my thoughts on it, although the flakiness of the position preferencing is still a pain in the ass!