Can't outbid my competitor

did something change with Adwords?

[4crests]

As of this morning, I can no longer outbid my competitor. I can't do any better than the #2 adwords spot on all of my keywords. It's almost as if my competitor bought the premium sponsorship, except, they aren't above the serps, they are the #1 adword on the right side.

It tells me in the Adwords control panel that I have the #1 bid, but when I search, I am #2. My best guess right now is that it's just a glitch, or Google is having some lag time in updating the bids. But, it's kind of scary. Anyone else having problems?

[dmorison]

Where does Adwords tell you your bid position? I can't see a page called "Control Panel" anywhere...

[defanjos]

Maybe he has the max bid set very high, and you never went above it.

[4crests]

dmorison,

I was reffering to the Campaign Management screen.

[4crests]

Google shows that I'm #1 in the campaign manager, but I show up #2 when I search. I've tripled my daily budget, and it doesn't matter how high I bid. It shows me as #1 for anything over 10 cents, but I'm still #2 when I search.

Maybe I'll try Anonymizer and see what happens. Maybe I'm showing #2 just on my computer.

[gsx]

Maybe to do with number of clickthroughs.

[4crests]

GSX.

No, i've been doing adwords for a long time, and pretty well understand how it all works. This has nothing to do with CTR or my Campaign Budget. This is either a change at Google, or a glitch. I am leaning towards the glitch explanation. I have seen stranger things with Adwords, and they usually go away after a day or two.

[4crests]

Poof, just like that, it's back to normal. I figured it would fix itself. Thanks all for the info.

[customdy]

We were ranking #3 up until about 9:30 last night when we got dropped down to about page 6, I think/hope this has to do with the problems from the last update.

Initiated Adwords, I am very familiar with it, Chose max bid, and max dollars per day, should be #1 position but I am showing up #5 in Adwords....

Seems like there is something definate wrong...

Can't win lately with Google.

[Robert Scott]

I've experienced the same problem. Adwords says I'm No.1 but in reality I'm number 2.

Google recently made some changes to the Campaign manager and I suspect it is now partly broken.

It is no longer reliable when trying to set a price or ad position. The only sure way to know is to run an ad and see what results you get.

The campaign manager was better before the changes. Now it's only half as good as it was.

[ianama]

Yep. Something's very fishy after the update. Drastic Position and clickthrough drops all of a sudden; half the campaigns not showing; $0.00 showing up in bids yesterday upon attempt to change price.

I hope this stuff gets worked out very soon, because google is quickly turning campaigns into diminishing returns, and its reputation might suffer if this is allowed to lag.

Ian A.