The world of Google Ads can be a difficult one to navigate without using a PPC Agency. There are so many layers to PPC that it is hard to find a starting point. However, we belive the best place to start is by understanding the term Ad Auction.
What Is A Google Ads Auction?
In short, every time that you head over to Google and search for something (or bing) the search engine runs a very quick autcion to decide what is the best and most relevant advert to display to you. It also determines the order of adverts to display at your time of searching. This is the Google Ads Auction. What makes their auction a little different to a normal every day auction is they dont necessarily sell that top or first ad position to the highest bidder. There are many reasons for this but the most important one is brand damage for Google.
For example, you could be searching for a "PPC Agency" however a company selling adult content could choose to bid for that search term. If Google was to display this result it is unlikely you would click on it as it bares no relevance to what you was searching for. Therefore Google comes across as irrelavent, not only that but as you didnt click on it, google didnt earn any money.
So, How Does Google Position Ads At Auction?
The three main factors that go in to deciding who wins the auction are Relvance, Bid and Landing Page Quality. Other then the bid, Google will determine these qualities using something called "Quality Score" this score is made up of many factors such as page speed, keywords, accessibilty and images etc.
The other things Google consider when deciding who and how to rank ads includes:
- Google ads crawling the websites to ensure the term your searching for matches the keywords used on the advertisers websites or product pages.
- Once Google does this it then filters out all ads that traget a different country, or different demographic or have other Ad settings that would prevent them from showing.
- Now Google has a handful of remaining adverts, it will then look at the Ad Rank of thier "Quality Score"
- Now using their Quality Score along with the maximum bid they have set they will determine their ad position.
Ad Rank Thresholds
This is quite a simple element, if you have set a maximum cost per click that your willing to bid or, a manual CPC and it is lower then the Google set threshold your advert will not display on Googles Paid Results. The threshold is forever changing and will vary with every search term entered in to Google. The Google Ad rank Threshold is determined dynamically based on all the factors mentioned above and effect all competitors as well. The factors considered at autcion time are vast and helps to ensure that when it comes to the price advertisers pay and the ads users see, the right consideration is given to the quality of the user experience, advertiser bids, and the value advertisers place on users’ engagement with their ads. What we tend to do as a PPC Agency is start your ads on a an industry standard Bid. We then work through your Shopping Feed and on page SEO to increase your quality score to be able to reduce this CPC to the lowest possible amount.
Ad Rank Factors Considered By Google
- First and foremost, your ad quality is the most important consideration Google takes when determining your Ad Rank! As mentioned your quality score is determied by many factors. One of which is your CTR or Expected CTR this is Googles estimation of how often people will click on your ad. A very important factor for Google as they want to make sure the person searches clicks on that ad so they earn money. Our method to increase Expected CTR is to ensure that our Chelmsford PPC Agency is optimisng wesbite data to be as relevant as possible. In addition, our PPC Agency needs to ensure that your site has a low bounce rate. Other factors considered, include Ad relevance and Landing Page experience. It is important that all 3 elemets align to give you the best chance and lowest cost at auction.
- Ad positon - The adverts that appear higher on the paid results have higher thresholds then ads that appear at the end of bottom of the paid search results.
- User settings - Now advertisers can create Ad signals that will lower the amount they are willing to spend in one particualr auction. For exmaple some advertisers may wish to bid less for searches carried out on a mobile device or consumers based in a particular town or searches made at a certain time of day. All these figures are considered.
Using Smart Bidding To Help
Whilst we can not stand automation such as Smart Shopping and Performance Max, Smart bidding is a useful tool our Colchester PPC Agency uses as it has outweighing benefits to soely using manual bidding at Ad Auction. Here are some of the benefits of smart bidding, according to Google:
Advanced machine learning – Uses many different algorithms to factor in a wider range of parameters that affect performance (more than a single person or team could compute).
Important considerations
Ultimately, the most important thing to remember is that even if your competition bids higher than you, you can still win a higher position – at a lower price – with highly relevant keywords and ads. With our Essex PPC Agency, when coupling our PPC Packages with our SEO Packages this is eaxactly what we do. We improve the content and relevance of your products or services to improve your Quality Score and move you up the ranks for advertising. Since the auction process is repeated for every search on Google/Bing, each auction can have potentially different results depending on the competition at that moment. Therefore it’s normal for you to see some fluctuation in your ad’s position on the page and in whether or not your ad shows at all.