Impressions & Average Position

[dmjarvis]

I have a few keywords that get a low average position, but with quite a few impressions. So, for instance one keyword might show as avg. pos. 85, but with 50 impressions.
Assuming that this keyword doesn't repeatedly switch between position 1 and position 170 (thereby averaging out at position 85), then does it suggest that 50 people have paged down as far as page 10 to see my keyword?

[Paul_N]

Is it a broad match or phrase match keyword? If so, there could be numerous different keywords your ad is showing on, some may be more competitive than others meaning your ad position will fluctuate high and low as an average.

Are you targeting more than one country in your campaign? If so US traffic is generally more competitive so your ad could be low down for a US searcher, but high up for a Canadian searcher.

Couple both of the situations above and you can have wildly fluctuating ad positions in your stats that simply average out as a single position.

Also, if it's a competitive keyword (and I guess it is), remember many webmasters pan down that far to see where their websites are positioned, both Adwords advertisers and search engine optimizers. This results in impressions but no clicks.

[dmjarvis]

Thanks. I think you may be right. I am targeting UK only for this keyword, but what you say still makes sense. It's a shame that Google cannot / does not diffentiate between automated and human searches, but I guess it evens itself out for everyone.

[inbound]

The answer lies in being able to set your preferences to 100 results.

100 results means that you could easily be on page 1 but so far down you can forget getting any exposure.