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See Ranking W/o Proxy?

         

Marls

1:40 pm on Jul 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi all,

I'm a tad confused. Given the Q/A below, does this now mean that we can freely review our actual AdWords ranking without having to go through a proxy server to avoid a regional/local ranking penalty?

Q: does this mean the ads will now actually *be* in the positions we expect, or only that we, the account owner, will *see* them in those positions when *we* check (i.e., a form of cloaking)?

A: They'll actually *be* - that is, in so far as this is possible, given that a fixed (or assured) position has never been a part of the AdWords program.

Thanks,
Marls

[edited by: jatar_k at 10:08 pm (utc) on July 27, 2005]

AdWordsAdvisor

11:26 pm on Jul 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I'm a tad confused. Given the Q/A below, does this now mean that we can freely review our actual AdWords ranking without having to go through a proxy server to avoid a regional/local ranking penalty?

Q: does this mean the ads will now actually *be* in the positions we expect, or only that we, the account owner, will *see* them in those positions when *we* check (i.e., a form of cloaking)?

A: They'll actually *be* - that is, in so far as this is possible, given that a fixed (or assured) position has never been a part of the AdWords program.

Marls, thanks for posting your question in a new thread, rather than in the Alerts thread. Much appreciated.

Sorry for the confusion. Assuming that I have understood your question correctly (and also correctly understood the question that you quoted), then the answer is that you should now be able to see your ad essentially as you did previous to the tuning of the algo.

This is not a guarantee, however - as actual position has always been highly variable, depending on the competitive landscape, which can easily change from one search to the next.

AWA

Marls

2:06 pm on Jul 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



AWA, one more time please (and thanks for your patience in advance).

Unless I've totally missed the point of other threads (entirely possible!), I was under the impression that if we searched for a KW on G to see the actual ranking of one of our ads, then that ad's position from a regional standpoint (where you’re geographically located when you do this) receives more impressions and fewer click throughs resulting in a lower CTR for that geographical region and therefore a lower ranking for that geographical region.

Is this still true?

Thx!

AdWordsAdvisor

4:19 am on Jul 29, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Marls, as is most often the case, I am not able to be more specific about the algo itself. That said, I'm not really sure how to say it any more clearly than I did in the original 'Alerts' post back on 7/18, which I quote here:

Recently a number of advertisers have had difficulty seeing their ad in the expected position, while searching on their own keywords. We have reviewed several reported cases of this occurrence, and have now further tuned the algo in order to prevent this occurrence in most cases.

AWA

mark1111

8:18 pm on Jul 29, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



AWA, the problem with this and your subsequent clarifications is that they seem to have backtracked from your original statement. What I originally asked, and what I think others are asking, relates to your use of the word "see." Does the ad position we see correspond to what others see, or is it merely a cosmetic adjustment being made for each account owner individually, to palliate objections about the discrepancies in expected ad position?

Thanks.

AdWordsAdvisor

2:06 am on Jul 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



mark1111, I'll answer your question point by point. But please keep in mind that the answer is made within the context of the facts shown in bullet points farther below, and that this has always been the case. (BTW, I am not sure if you saw that I did answer the same essential question (within a longer post) in the other thread in which it was first posed.

Does the ad position we see correspond to what others see...

Yes it does.

...or is it merely a cosmetic adjustment being made for each account owner individually, to palliate objections about the discrepancies in expected ad position?

No, it is not a cosmetic adjustment.

Context:

* Position has never been fixed in the AdWords program.

* It has always been possible, literally, for ad position to shift from one search to the next - whether the searches are being done by the same person, or different people in different locations. This is an expected behavior.

* Because your position is not fixed, it is expressed as Average Position. Average Postion is not an estimate. Rather, it is the exact average of all actual positions, for whatever number of impressions one is looking at.

AWA