I'm currently optimizing the position of all my keywords in Google Adwords, in the aim to have all of them (a few thousands) ranked in first position.
This aim is nearly reached, and the adwords preview tool tend to confirm this trend in giving me a position between 1 and 1.5 for all keywords.
However, when I use the reporting tool for the recent bit of time since I managed to be positionned as first for all my keywords(It will be one week tomorrow)and configure the reporting tool for this short bit of time... The results are completely different and do not seem to have evolved in anyway compared to before my last massive improvement.
Could anyone let me know which of these two tools is providing me the most accurate results/the time needed before the reporting eventually gets updated with the improved data (if applicable)?
Thanks for your help,
Bastien
With what targeting settings are you checking your positions via the Ad Preview Tool? What position is your reporting data showing?
Thanks for your answer.
Well, for each country, we set the adwords preview tool to the proper country, language and google website (i.e.: finland will be google.fi, finnish language and finish terriory)
Searching a given keyword 50 times will show us in position #1 50 times...
However, going to the reporting tool, we will be ranked sometimes between 1 and 1.5, sometimes a bit further, sometimes up to 3! This obviously doesn't correspond at all to what we see in the Preview tool...
It's, unfortunately, the nature of the beast... but, as for the source that I "trust" - it would have to be the reporting as it represents actual performance. But, this is typically why I leave a little margin of error when shooting for top positions on certain keywords.
Cheers
Saying this, you may never see the “bad” ad that is actually showing on position 2 or even 3 all the time for its total of 1% of the share for given ad group. This is enough to make your position reporting to be 1.3 or 1.5.
In addition, although Google takes Google only into performance history account, stuff you see in the interface (reporting) is from search partners as well. I don’t even know how positions from AOL get reported, since AOL serves first ad at its own, and the rest is from Google. I would assume that if my ad is on position 2, that would equal to position 1 on Google.
Also, I had cases where I would have “bestgreenwidgets” as a phrase. Such keywords would usually have lot of impressions but no or almost no clicks, position straight 1.0. I phoned once and got explanation that impressions came from one of the search partners. It should still be search, meaning people have typed this into search box, but did they?
As poster_boy said, any keyword could be locally targeted and show above your ad(s), and you’ll never see that, unless you check each state and city separately.
All this can influence average position.
I've got another question which I'll put there rather than starting a new topic:
We have a massive lot of keywords for all of our territories, which we would like, in an ideal situation, to have all in first position in the search results.
This is obviously not possible, for the reasons quoted above and other reasons. However, we've been noticing that whatever the improvements we manage in terms of improving our keywords positions and pushing it higher wherever it says we're not by the top (aim stays, here again position 1-1.5 for each keyword) the reporting always comes with the same result:
Since November, we are first for 89% to 90.5% of our keywords, never more, never less...
Hence the question:
Is it possible to raise closer to 100% or does Google automatically places a limit to block us towards the 90% barreer. If this is the case, is the setting of a 5-10% secondary-interest keywords a way to keep our most important ones on top or is it more likely to harm our campaign?
Thanks
