Noob questions i need to get out the way so i can get medievil on this

[lloydforth]

Hello people

i have been adwording since august i started off real well on this but i feel i have fallen off the bike and grazed my knee!

here goes

I just ramped my Daily budget and put my CPC at a decent amount i then went to google and did a search on my top keyword

i got served 4th (overall) excellent

so then i repeated my search ...nada ...not served at all

kept clicking the search button on google and my ad doesn't get served.
so what determines ad's being served ... i am under the impression that until my MDB is exceeded my ad is served ..am i wrong.

also will clicking on my own ad increase my CTR and therefore bump me up the list? or is this monitored?

whats the deal when there are lots of advertisers jockeying to get served

i started off real well on this a month back but i feel i have fallen off the bike and grazed my knee!

[fidibidabah]

There's a couple of reasons why your ad might not show up every time. Here's the most probable one:

Lets say you're using a keyword like 'home loans'. Really high priced. Lets say you have a max CPC of $11.01, but your average CPC is about $10. Now, lets say your daily limit is set to $1,000. Now here's the trick. At $10CPC, your ad can only be clicked on 100 times before you reach your limit. So instead of showing your Ad _EVERY TIME_ untill you reach your limit, they show it expedentially. So if you have a %1 CTR, then your ad only needs to be showed 10,000 times to get 100 clicks. You see? So this is all and good if there are 10,000 searches a day for that term, but what if there are 20,000? If the same term is searched 20,000 times a day, it knows that would double your daily limit, so instead of showing your ad for the first 10,000, it shows it EVERY OTHER time throughout the 20,000. Now if there's 40,000 searches for that term, it's going to show it every 4th time, etc.

I hope that makes sense (and I hope it's right, that's how I was told how it worked :D)

[eWhisper]

I believe fidibidabah is correct about the ad serving.

also will clicking on my own ad increase my CTR and therefore bump me up the list? or is this monitored?

You might get charged once or twice for the clicks, but after that G knows your repeatedly clicking and no longer counts those clicks.