By Jackie
Many advertisers originally believe that they ideally need to be in the first or second position in Google Adwords to get the results they want. The cost of clicks in the highest positions are substantially more expensive than the lower ones, and in some industries this can mean a difference of a few pounds or euros for each click. However all keywords and their related products or services have PPC optimal converting positions.
What Position Should You Really Be In?
Here’s the thing – many customers click on these top ads automatically. Some do it without even thinking, whereas others at least have the intention to buy. However even after clicking on the first ad, depending on the person, the product or service, this potential customer will often click on a few ads in lower positions.
When they are ready to make a decision, they will choose whichever of these tick all of their boxes. The advertiser they choose will not necessarily be the first one that they clicked on, it could be number 3 or number 4.
Each campaign and the service or product that belongs to it has an optimal converting position. Over time it is possible to pinpoint which ad position this is. In fact for quite a number of clients this could be the ad that shows in position 3 or 4. It depends on various factors. However without testing and gathering data you will never know.
So why pay more for higher positions unless the evidence shows that these are in fact your optimal converting positions?
Here’s What You Need To Do
In order to make more money from your PPC advertising your first port of call should be the PPC Account History. This works very effectively when you have conversion tracking set up and especially if your business converts predominantly online. However if you know the proportion of online and offline conversions, say for example it is 70% online and 30% offline then you can do your figures accordingly.
No-one likes to spend money unnecessarily so the immediate step to take is to identify the optimum converting position initially for the account overall. To do this choose the All Time option inside the Google Adwords account while choosing the All Online Campaigns option which is on the left hand top of the screen, just under the reporting tab. This will give you an immediate overview.
The Google interface has the option to choose Conversions Many Per click which covers conversions of customers who bought within a 30 day time period, after they clicked on your ad, using the same computer. In some customer cases this can be double the old conversion information and is therefore extremely important. To find this you click on Filter and Views which is on the right hand side a little under the date choice, click on Customise Columns on the drop down menu. Then select Conv.(many-per-click), Cost/Conv (many-per-click) and Conv. Rate (many-per-click).
Now that you have this more in-depth information arrange the campaigns so that the one which has the most conversions is at the top by clicking once on the column 3 from the right called Conv. (many-per-click). If you get the lowest first by some chance just click one more time and it will reverse. Next study the cost per conversion which can be seen in the Cost/Conv. (many-per-click) and as you do this glance over to the column called Avg. Pos. (means average position) which is 6 columns back over to the left.
Make Gradual Changes
Comparing the best performing campaigns, the ones that convert most and with low cost per conversions, see if there is a trend regarding the average position. Say for example you have two campaigns that convert a lot but one is in an average position 2 and the other in an average position 5. If you believe that the psychology of the target audience is similar then you can consider to move the position 2 down to position 3 or 4 to begin. Don’t do anything too radical too suddenly, make the changes slowly and monitor the response.
We have seen a number of clients who truly believed that they had to be in position 1 to convert as much as possible. However the harsh reality is that many people automatically click on the top one or two ads habitually. When they are ready to buy it can often be an ad in a much lower position that gets their business! By adopting this approach it is possible not only to save a lot of your PPC advertising budget purely on less expensive clicks, but if it is done correctly you will have more conversions at a lower cost per conversion. Kind of a no-brainer as they say!