I was wondering if this is possible... i have several hundreds of keywords that i want to set to position 2 or 3 for some testing but can't seem to find any way that allows me to do this... suggestions are more than welcome!
You can't. i asked them about this too. The only way I've found is to copy the entire list of keywords into Word and right justify the list. Then copy somehting like **0.30**#4-8** or whatever and paste onto the Right hand side of each line. You will use the down arrow a lot but you don'[t need the mouse. When you're done, copy and paste the list back into Adwords, replacing what was there before.
I assume that doing this for an existing keyword list means that you lose all CTR's associated with the keywords, and other history? I've enabled the prefered positioning 30 hours ago and am still waiting to see some results... the goal is to get my ads from position 1 back to 3-5 to get more cheaper clicks for my budget. How are your experiences with such attempts?
I don't know about losing CTR history. I don't see why you should lose it, since the computer doesn't know that you didn't edit the preferences one at a time. It has the same result as editing the preferences one at a time on the Google site, without the tedium. I don't have any experience at getting cheaper clicks.
you need to edit campaign settings and check the box which says: "enable position preferences" then when you go to the keywords tab you need to check the box that checks all the boxes on the page and choose "edit keyword settings" then there will be an extra column where you can choose your position preference and apply it to all the keywords. if you have more than 1 page of keywords you need to do the same for the next page. does this help?