I have a search network campaign that gets about 1,500 clicks per day. My conversion rate was pretty bad, so I decided to polish things up. My avg ad position had been around 4.0 most days.
I turned on ad positioning and selected positions 1 through 3, with the assumption that if my ads mainly show up in the top 3 spots, my CTR should increase and my overall bids long term should come down.
I actually implemented the position preference for 2 ad groups on a handful of words.
What I discovered today (so far... because it hasnt been a full 24 hours yet) is that my avg position has improved to about a 2.6, but my CTR is way down --- about 1/2 to 1/3 what it was before. This is the opposite of what I thought would happen.
I have been doing adwords for well over a year and spend 6 figures per year for this, and have split test everything and know what it takes to get CTR up. I had never used ad positioning though until just recently, and I just cant figure out why the CTR would go down. My CTR has ALWAYS gone up when I move a keyword into the top 3 positions.
Anybody know why this might be happening?
Is google doing some kind of mathematical factoring witht his? For example, if your ad was supposed to be shown 100 times but because of positioning you only get shown 50 times, and you get 5 clicks, do they only give you a 5% CTR instead of the 10% you should get?
This is very worrisome for me since CTR affects overall bid pricing.
Maybe some of you can experiment and report back.
green widgets, avg pos = 3.8, ctr = 4%
blue widgets, avg pos = 2.5, ctr = 2%
yellow widgets, avg pos = 5.0, ctr = 5%
And you then turned on pos pref and set it to 2-4...
Or 1-3 like your case...
Your ctr would go down.
In fact, if we look at the original nunbers, how can some keywords that have a higher position, have a lower ctr compared to their peers? Could be competitive factors, like others don't make a yellow version of the widget, but bid high on broad widgets or colored widgets or whatever.
So you see, I think you've supplied insufficient data for anyone to answer your question here, that's all, no "Wow" here.
My avg ad position had been around 4.0 most days.I turned on ad positioning and selected positions 1 through 3 ...
First of all, the main impact of that action is that you will get far fewer impressions. Position preference will not raise your bids to get you in the specified positions; if your bid is not high enough to get you in the preferred positions, the result is that your ad will not be shown.
I think the first thing for you to do is to look closely at your server web logs and check the HTTP referer info to see where the traffic is coming from and compare it to the earlier state.
My guess from the limited information in this thread is that your bid is not high enough to appear in positions 1-3 on Google.com, so the ad is showing on the rest of the search network only (i.e., non-Google sites). The non-Google portion of the search network provides a lower number of impressions that Google.com and the CTR is lower as well, so that matches what you are seeing.
But as I mentioned, look at the referer data in your log files to get a better picture of what's going on.
