Lost top position after an edit

[Samuel Downey]

I had only just started using adsense 3 weeks ago. Within a week, I was second position on the top bar (which in my opinion was great because it meant I was closer to the natural results)

I made an edit to highlight we were having a particular sale and ended up getting pushed back down into the right hand side again. My competitor remained in the top section and my CTR dropped a bit. I then decided to place a high bid and ended up forcing my competitor below me on the right hand side to stop him getting extra CT's.

Since then, I've had an average CTR of 11.4% (which is continuing to grow) and an average CPC of £0.42.What's annoying though, is that despite this, I still have yet to be moved back up again to the top bar (where I know it will prove to bring further conversions) despite what I believe to be better performance than previous.

I have since changed all the settings to the way they were before, and decreased my max CPC to find that my competitor gets moved back up to the top spot while I remain at the right.

Is it just me or does this seem silly? Over what space of time do they measure the CTR not to mention the CPC to judge the top bar position? Does anyone know the answer other than the Google Representative (if even he knows?) I'm getting annoyed at the loss of CTR that I was achieving before whereas with the Overture simple system, I end up being #1 every time and achieve a very high CTR that leads to a very high conversion rate at the same time.

Oh, and hello! First post here, been lurking for the past 3 weeks and found the forum to be very useful.

[Shak]

Samuel

welcome to WebmasterWorld, always good to have a fellow UK person on board.

Shak

[Samuel Downey]

Thanks very much for the welcome Shak. I may have to become a permanent member is adwords keeps annoying me ;)

[eWhisper]

IMO - never edit an approved ad.

When you edit an ad, its treated as a new ad, and won't be shown on partner sites until its gone through the approval process, and it's past history is gone.

Instead of editing ads, make a new ad, wait for it to be approved for content syndication, and then delete the old ad. Deleting an ad will allow the stats to be kept for reporting/comparision purposes.

This recent thread has links to the answers to your questions:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Samuel Downey, you may also find this background info, pasted from an earlier thread, to be useful:

position on the right hand side is based on a slightly different algo that position on the top.

* For the ads on the right your Max CPC and your CTR are equally weighted.

Ads on the right can be sent to the top spots (maximum of two) if the meet an additional performance standard that weights CTR more heavily.

* For the ads on the top, your actual CPC is more important than your Max CPC, and your CTR is more than 50% of the equation.

So, you can't really send your ads from the right to the top by simply paying more. The best way to get up there is to really target your keywords/ads so your get a higher CTR.

Excerpted from: [webmasterworld.com...] post 10

And welcome to WebmasterWorld!

(PS - If I were eWhisper, I'd have been able to find the exact thread I was looking for. But this one was the closest to ideal that I could find in the time I had...)

AWA

[Samuel Downey]

Thanks for the replies people. I had read about these things already, I was just wondering why Adwords hadn't remembered the past performance of the word post edit.

Looking at the keyword group, it looks as though the main broad matched word has lost its history of +1000 shows. From what I read elsewhere, the top slot is issued when looking at your past history of 1000 shows, so I am imagining once my ad has been shown a further 1000 times (again post edit) that it will stand a better of chance of moving to the top slot.

Please let me know if my understanding is correct or not.