So you like it on top? Get your mind out of the gutter! I am talking about a feature for Adwords called Position Preference. Google has announced they’re retiring the position preference bidding feature in AdWords. Advertisers will no longer be able to select a preference to what position they would like their ad to be placed.
You can learn more about the Average Position metric on Google’s blog. Google will begin to disable this feature early in May. In the meantime, if you’re going to disable position preference before May, Google recommends that you first export your manual bids by downloading a keyword report to back up any bids you set before you turned on position preference. This report will include keyword-level maximum CPC bids.
Advertisers who would like to continue to target specific ad positions, you can use “Automated Rules.”
What are automated rules?
Automated rules are changes to a bid, budget, or status on part of your account (scoped/filtered lists of keywords, campaigns, ad groups, or ads) that are triggered at a particular time. Creating a rule can help you manage your account without having to regularly monitor your activity and make changes.
Learn more about automated rules.
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Google Search Update Already Impacting Content Farms
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Interesting…wonder if this will change how any ads display.
I think this change sucks big time!
I am using position preference now and I foresee that I have to spend a lot of time to create rules to accomplish the same – including some trial and error.
By complicating matters, Google will benefit from a lot of users making mistakes when trying to get the effect of the simple solution of position preference. Mistakes are very profitable for our “friends” at Google, because many people will end up overpricing their bids or with a lot of low-positioned impressions that they did not want to pay for.
Thanks Google! We know who you are taking care of.
I’m tempted to agree with you. By making it hard for advertisers to get the position right the first time, you’re right, they’ll probably overpay. It’s a shady move if you ask me.
This is not good. It will put off advertiser who certainly want to be on the top and want to see their advert appear in the top. Google will sure start loosing money as well.
Ajay,
As I stated – “Advertisers who would like to continue to target specific ad positions, you can use “Automated Rules.” Plus everyone is affected so the playing field is level.
What a crock of shit! Sure, you can target the specific ad positions as before, but at a huge extra expense.
It has now been about a month since position preference was removed. My click price is up 5% and I have been competed out of one of my markets on Google AdWords. It may be a level playing field, but the big winners are the greedy bastards at Google and the competitors with the deepest pockets!
I had a pos.pref. set to 1-3 on a very competitive market. Back then my impression share would be <10%, but I would get impressions and clicks that suited my budget. After pos.pref. was removed, my impression share went over 80%, but my average position was worse than 7. In my type of business, the ROI on very low positions is also very low. If I wanted to target the same positioning as before, I would end up paying more than twice the click price I had earlier – even if I made a rule to pause the campaign once a certain amount of clicks or spending was reached.
It does not take a rocket scientist to calculate that double the click price for the same position also means a lower ROI, so I decided to stop the campaign for that very competitive market and am now spending that money on Bing and Yahoo for that market.
Position preference was a great benefit to me as a small advertiser, as I could participate with a small share on a very competitive market. The 'savings' from my closed campaign is higher than the 5% higher click price, so overall Google has lost a share of my online marketing budget. In my book that is a loose loose relationship.
I am not surprised if Google is gaining what they lost on me from the large advertisers, but Google has gained a lot of bad will from my side, so ,in the future, whenever I stand in front of two options for spending my online marketing budget, Google will not be my choice number one.
Thomas,
I agree and many smaller companies preferred position preference. Google will probably lose some money here as the small to medium online companies will go else where. That still remains to be seen.
I am also using google adwords but I use auto biding and rules so I think I wont be affected ?
Vijay,
You will be fine as that is the alternative.
Thanks for sharing such a nice and informative post
One of my campaigns Position Preference was disabled by Google 2 days ago. My average position has dropped from 1.5 to 2.9 and in some cases my top keywords postion has dropped from 1.5 to 5.8. My campaigns have a long history (4 years) of high av pos/auction results, high clicks #’s & high CTR’s. The ONLY reason Google would change an already sophisticated advertising model is to benefit their bottom line. Whilst one can say its an even playing field for all, it really isn’t because as a very small business owner, I was able to compete up until now. With many new major/large/well-funded players entering my ‘space’ in the past 10 months(Group Buying Sites who sell Spa/Skin Clinic deals – I own a Spa) I’m at a distinct disadvantage as I’m not as well-funded/resourced as larger players. I personally manage my account/campaigns and whilst its time consuming it’s revolutionised my business advertising. I agree with other comments that it will now require even more time and $$ to compete. For me its a matter of actual business survival with the retail industry going backwards in Australia. One might guess that Google is feeling the pain as well, so to keep it’s shareholders happy, they’ve needed to find new ways to grow revenue from their existing client base. But hey, it’s not personal, its just business…