I am bewildered by a certain phenomenon which I had experienced recently with one of my campaign. This experiment was done on a keyword with a QS of 10. The ad triggered usually has a poor position. Seeing that the QS is already 10, I am thinking in the line that the bidding price is the only issue. Of course 10 might not be the max QS, but its hard to work towards improving the QS if we do not have an absolute measurement of it. I increased my bidding price by about $1 to $2 and expect a positive but possibly slight change in position. Imagine my horror when I test with Ad Preview, to see my ad dropped at least 2-3 places down and a higher CPC charged. I think this is kinda absurd. Although the system shows that the keyword enjoyed an average position of 4.7, I am seeing it a 8 and 9. Please note that I did not do the testing once, but several times over the course of a working day. Anyone experience this before too?
The problem is that your changes are not instantaneous across the whole system. There are many data centers and it takes some time before all of them "get the message". If you made your change and immediately checked, I would not expect to see a change. In fact, you are using a small sample size which means nothing, especially a sample size of one impression. Remember that average position is, well, an average. Three impressions in 3rd, 6th and 12th position is an average of 7. You just happened to notice your ad in 12th. Instead, trust actual data from your Adwords account. If bidding $1 yesterday gave you a certain position, bidding $2 should give you a higher position today. All else being equal of course. At lest you're using the ad preview feature and not Google itself. That's a system unto itself I believe and may be a lower priority to get updated which would explain you seeing this for a whole day. By the way, I believe the QS used in calculations may indeed go beyond ten. So even if you do see a QS of 10, the apparent maximum, ads can still be improved for lower CPC.
Hi mate, always nice to see your reply. in fact i checked it after a few day, thats why i was bewildered. I dont expect instant answer from the system. I will report the result again next week, just to give the system some time to "settle down".