The question is, how does Google determine if an ad will appear on top?
This formula seems to have changed lately as a lot of my ads which were at the top of the page, are now number one for the sidebar and there is no one on the top anymore.
IMHO for 20 campaigns it should show 2 x 8 and 1 x 4. At least this is what I have discovered.
onlineleben, you and I were saying the same thing, but you were more precise. To be more specific:
Page 1 = ads 1 through 8
Page 2 = ads 9 through 16
Page 3 = ads 17 through 20
How comes that sometimes I then only see pages with e.g. 4 ads on Google?
On searches for which fewer than 8 ads show, it means that either:
* There are fewer than 8 total advertisers, or
* There are fewer than 8 advertisers who are budgeted to appear at that moment
eWhisper, you've raised an excellent point. In the transitional period during which the Premium Sponsorship program is being phased out, it is in fact possible that 10 AdWords ads will show.
I also suspect that you're correct that the 'formula' has changed lately. This in not in my arena, but an educated guess is that 'formula' will evolve until the Premium Program has ended on December 31st. At that point, I'm guessing that more information will be available. However, as most Top Spot Watchers are already aware, the exact formula in not detailed.
I also wonder if sometimes only 4 show up because there's a big gap in click through rate between ad #4 and #5, so Google just shows the top 4 sometimes to see if the click throughs for #4 stay the same or if showing more ads raises or lowers it. I'm sure they're constantly testing and reviewing some of these types of patterns on really popular terms.
