Sometimes it happens that your advert is showing on #1 on the right like in this example and there are just organic results on the left.
It’s actually possible in this situation to force Google to display your advert on the left like this:
(Note: Sometimes your advert will appear naturally on the left, what I’m talking about is how to ensure that when you are the #1 ranking advertiser on AdWords you always appear on the left and not on the right. The benefit of doing that is that by being on the left you’ll get more clicks and so a higher CTR)
The way to do this is to bid a large amount on the keyword. This doesn’t means you are going to pay more than when you appearead on the right (if your advert is already showing #1), you may actually end up paying less if your CTR increases.
So let’s say you are currently bidding $0.5 for the top slot, but you appear on the right. And let’s say your average CPC is $0.3 (this is determined by what the other advertisers did bid).
If you now bid $10 instead of $0.5 you’ll still be paying $0.3 as AdWords uses a proxy auction model, and your CPC is determined by what the other advertisers are bidding. So the rule is that if you are already #1 and you increase your bid your CPC will stay the same but your’ll now get promoted to appearing on the left simply because you have a large bid amount.
There is however a danger in doing that, if one of the other advertisers that are currently below you were to increase their bid let’s say to $9 you would have to pay $9 for that click. So you have to closely monitor your AdWords spend and immediately reduce your bid if you see your CPC increasing too much.
Giotto De Filippi Uncategorized
I want to review and compare different bid management tools that our readers are using to write a post with the findings.
If you are using a bid management system, what is it? Are you happy with the results? What are the functions of this tool and how do you use it?
Please post a comment on this post.
Giotto De Filippi Uncategorized
I get many comments from people suggesting that instead of using the advanced technique for finding negatives I suggest in this post it’s better to just stick to the search query report.
Here is my answer:
First it’s a myth that the search query report gives you search queries that don’t get clicks. It’s true that it shows the impressions but if a search query get impressions but no clicks you won’t see it.
To prove my point I took the following screenshot:
As you can see out of almost half a million impressions if I sort by clicks the report I get only 3 search queries that have zero clicks.
So if you really want to learn (and put as negatives) what are the irrelevant terms that you are getting impressions for but no clicks the recommendation of starting with a very generic ad is very effective.
Now when it comes to clicks I’m certainly not against using that report, but very often you’ll just see: “XX other unique queries” - something that would not happen if you analyze your server logs or use an analytics software.
Here are a myth I would like to debunk:
High CTR is not necessarily a good thing, by adding the right negatives you may actually be reducing your CTR when you add keywords that get many clicks but don’t convert, so don’t use CTR as a measure of success of adding negatives.
Summary of steps to EFFECTIVELY add negatives (and I’m saying adding negatives, not increasing CTR!)
- Use a very generic advert so that you get as many clicks as possible
- Discover negatives (words which are creating impressions but not converting)
- You can use your server logs, an analytics program or the search query report to see those search queries (ideally use all)
- Always add the negative, even if that word appeared just once, it may be the tip of the iceberg of plenty of impressions with very low CTR
Giotto De Filippi adwords
