Google Advertising Rankings
Advertising with Google is not just a case of whoever bids the largest amount for each click on an advert gets the top position. There are a number of factors involved in advertising ranking.
Maximum Cost Per Click
You can set your maximum cost per click at the Ad Group level and for each individual keyword. For example you might set up an Ad Group with a default cost per click of 50p, but decide that one of your keywords is so important to you that you will bid £2 for each click received on this keyword. The Maximum Cost Per Click (CPC) obviously has an impact on where your advert will be shown, but there are other important factors to take into account.
Click Through Rate
Click Through Rate (CTR) is important to Google as they need to continue delivering relevant adverts to potential visitors or they will lose the confidence of these users. CTR is calculated by dividing the number of times your advert has been shown (impressions) by the number of times visitors have clicked on this advert.
Keyword Relevance
If your keywords are not relevant to your advert then your advert will not be considered very relevant by Google. The most relevant adverts will include the keyword in the title of the advert.
Landing Page Quality
The Google Ad words system also visits and analyses the web pages your adverts are aimed at to calculate the quality of your adverts. So we will make sure that your landing pages are optimised to achieve the best possible rating from Google.
Quality Score
Google takes into consideration all the above factors and some secret algorithms to calculate your advert's quality score:
Quality Score Determines how much you have to pay for each click on your advert!
Is Number One the best?
No! Quite often you will find that the top two rated adverts have has a little 'bidding war' to get to the top, Say for example two rival advertisers are bidding £3 and £2.99 per click to maintain the top two slots, we can sometimes find that bidding at 30p can gain us the third position!
The great thing about Google is that you will only pay 1p more than the next lower bidder to climb the ladder.