I wouldn't mind being number 2 or 3 for most of my keywords, I think in some cases, three is better.
When I increase my bid google seems to increase my postion as well as the number of clicks I might get.
Is it possible to 'pin' the position, say at 3, and pay for the ads to shown more frequently, rather than have google move me up the ladder for the same, or slightly increased, amounts of traffic.
It seems difficult to compare bids when there are so many variables for each bid.
But maybe I just want it to be easy and it isn't!
You will need to take several things into consideration. As you monitor your positions, it will need to be based only on the time frame since your last bid change (1 day, 2 days, a week). Also, whether or not you have the Content and Search options turned on can make a difference in where you see yourself in Google. Where you are regionally can also affect where you see your own ads or where other people in other regions see your ads.
I would shoot for the average position that brings you the best results for a reasonable bid price (that seems to be in the #3 to #6 spot for most of my clients with just Google or Google/Search options on) and not worry alot about where you are positioned in the Search Network or regionally.
Having the Content option turned on will make it really tough for you to get even close to an accurate gage on what position you are showing on just Google so you might want to keep Content turned off while you are doing your bid adjustments.
My take on the scenario is that once a user starts clicking AdWords and is in AdWords-clicking mode, she'll thoroughly explore the whole stack. At least until she finds exactly what she wants--
This could happen higher up, before she gets down to your ad, but still, the food for thought is: it would seem that bidding for the highest AdWords positions may not be quite as absolutely necessary as one might assume.
I guess that most of the problem is that google's delivery of the ads changes according to how many searches there are, so they can't accurately predict what will happen any more than I can.
Assuming you want to make money, then the only variable to adjust is your profit.
i.e. Try a range of bids, tabulate/graph them like follows:
Bid. ¦ $/day.¦ Profit/Day
---------------------------
0.01 ¦ $15.. ¦ $25
0.10 ¦ $150. ¦ $100
1.00 ¦ $200. ¦ $450
5.00 ¦ $600. ¦ $200
Find the combination which gives you the highest profit per day, in the example that would be $1.00/click. Don't worry about if that's from 1000 clicks on $0.01 ads in position 10, or 10 clicks on $1.00 ads in position 1.
You can still do well in lower positions and not pay as much per bid. There are tons of stats and reports out there as well as posts on this forum that back that up.
I recently had a client drop from spending close to 30K a month to spending around 4K a month. They dropped from an average position of 2.7 and monthly clicks around 20K to an average rank of 6.4 and monthly clicks around 8,500. Biggest difference...number of conversions (they tripled when we dropped our bids/positioning), cost per conversion dropped significantly and they are now showing a profit from their Google marketing.
The problem with going with what makes the most profit is that there is a learning curve while I work out what that will be. This make it difficult in a company where some people don't want to take the risk.
My first campaign is up and running. A few clicks but no sales yet. It's a very niche market and the wrong time of year so I'm not going to give up yet.
I noticed that yesterday I seemed to get 81 impressions and 4 clicks. Does this mean my ad was shown to 81 people and only 4 of them were interested enought to click. Seems an incredibly low click through rate to me.
I still think it would be great to be able to 'shop' a bit more at google rather than have the constant experimenting and reloading of pages which tell you what might happen. But we can all wish...
I noticed that yesterday I seemed to get 81 impressions and 4 clicks. Does this mean my ad was shown to 81 people and only 4 of them were interested enought to click. Seems an incredibly low click through rate to me.
meg8, if my mental math is correct, that’s about a 5% CTR, which is pretty good actually. ;) (I'd say that average is around 2%, though I certainly see CTRs in the double digits every day.)
BTW, I think that 81 impressions is really too small a sample size to be statistically meaningful - so you're likely to see this change as you get into the several hundreds of impressions.
AWA
Notice, that more specific keywords are better, because general queries have many meanings and only small portion of people using these queries actually look for your offer.
