Ask not what position your ad is in but what position best serves your business

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"I want to come up first in Google"

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This statement echoes in my head because 90% of the time it's in the first few words of each phone call I get. This statement creates great conversations on the business, products, services, market areas, and other key elements of the marketing strategy. This helps us understand the businesses we are serving but it does not address the issue of search engine position.

I rarely address the "I want to be first" statement directly because it is fundamentally flawed and not in line with the real business objectives. Business people are by nature competitive they want to win and they want to be first. Being first serves our egos but it's not necessarily the best place for your business.

Position counts but you cannot get so focused on one attribute of the game that you lose focus on the big things. Advertising needs to feed your business in balance with the budget and your ability to serve new business. We have seen examples of too much new business where clients have had us throttle back to give operations a chance to catch their breath. In other cases we reduced the client's position bids because being first made the sales unprofitable. If it costs $100 to generate $50 in gross profit you do not want to do that too many times.

Golden Rule of Positioning #1: Position your ad as high as necessary but no higher

We like to look at this from a business objective standpoint, so we often ask clients how much is a new customer worth to your business? This is often a thought-provoking question that creates a great dialog. If the client decides that a sales lead is worth $100 then the process becomes one of finding the maximum number of leads that you can generate with a cost at or below that number and within budget. There is a relationship between the cost of the lead and the quantity of leads you can generate. In most situations the more leads you generate the high the cost per lead since you are getting into less qualified traffic with lower response rates or you are paying more to be in a higher position.

Another limiting factor in this game is the budget, and yes, everyone has one.

There come times in Adwords Management when the daily budget is regularly stopping ad delivery because there is more traffic than money. In these cases the last place you want to be is first because your marketing goals just changed. The goal in this case becomes getting the cheapest clicks possible resulting in the most visitor per dollar.

Like many business decisions position is a ying and yang challenge with position, click through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and budget. The general rules are:

1. The lower the position the higher the CPC
2. The lower the position the higher the CTR
3. The more visitors the more business
4. The higher the CPC the fewer the visitors
5. The budget ends the game

The problem is that these statements are not 100% correct although they are generally true. Did you see how I talked out of both sides of my mouth at the same time? Higher position does not always create a higher CTR and a more visitors do not always create more business. What you have to do is find the right balance for your business and then consistently execute that strategy. A healthy web site has a good balance between its direct, referral, paid, and organic with a steady growth.

Is it time to revisit the Content Network?

The Content Network isn't always the best neighborhood to play in. It isn't uncommon for novice Adwords advertisers to not even realize that they're getting a huge percentage of their traffic from the Content Network until they look down and notice their watch is missing and their wallet is empty. Not to say that the Content Network can't convert, it just has to be handled as a separate entity from regular Search.


As most people, know we have not been fans of the content network and for good reason. We had several new clients that came to us because of the damage that was being done by the content network. While we appreciated the business that this brought to us, we can think of much better ways to gain a client. Several clients saved thousands of dollars each month simply by turning off the Content Network with little impact on their revenue. There were conversions in the Content Network but the decision was either turn it off or try to guess where the abuse was coming from. Our decision was to turn it off if it did not meet the conversion cost goals of the client. We knew we were leaving potential conversions on the table but we also knew it was better for our client to not make those conversions.

Then in June 2007 Google responded to market pressure by releasing the "Placement Report" and professionals in the field immediately went to work using this new tool. The Placement Report allowed for the first time the ability to see where the traffic was coming from by using the site exclusion tool we could finally manage this traffic. In the first several months of the release of this we used this report to isolate and document some horrible things that were going on but we were not recommending a return to the content network for clients that had problems.

Our friends at Google are masters at the art of partial information and they did not disappoint us with this report. It tracks many clicks back to the specific URL your ad showed on but it also contains entries like "Domain Name" and "Error Pages," and these are largely unmanageable. We find it interesting that these common entries are missing from the examples and documentation but this just comes with the territory. There is a substantial delay between the time the data is reported in Adwords and when it is available to this report so you have to wait for your data.

Because of this new information we have slowly begun to revisit the content network, especially for clients that lost a number of conversions when this was turned off in the account. Some clients lost lots of unprofitable conversions are showing some good early results but this has to be done slowly and carefully. The Content Network and the Search Network operate very differently and mixing the campaigns is a huge mistake. Bringing a content network campaign online is done differently than a search campaign.

If you would like to discuss how this might impact your Adwords strategy please contact us.