Adwords Express Placement and Explanation

[KempRugeLawGroup]

I spoke with the adwords express rep about this, and he was extremely vague and unhelpful. So, I'd appreciate some assistance...even though it's a lot of questions. Whatever insights you can share to any portion of this, i would greatly appreciate.

We setup an adwords express account, and we set our budget $50 over what Adwodrds Express says was our competitors average range.

However, our ads only show up on the bottom right side of page 2. We are trying to figure out why that is? Are adwords express accounts only placed on the lower tier of PPC by definition?

Will they always be on the bottom of a sidebar on the second page?

Does it depend on how much we are willing to pay a month? So, if we double what we are willing to pay per month, will the ad move up?

Also, it's not clear to me at all, how much we are being charged per click or how we are being billed. How are they determining what each click costs?

Happy Friday and thanks in advance,

Ruben

[troy.evans]

Hi Ruben,

I would definitely agree with Eric on this one and highly recommend that you use the regular AdWords interface to view and analyze your account performance. It has been a while since I have been in an account that was set up using AdWords Express but I believe there is a link to view the account as a regular AdWords account from the Express dashboard.

To diagnose why your ads are showing on the sidebar you would want to review keyword quality scores to find out where you can improve. It might have to do with you ad copy or landing page content not being relevant enough to the keywords you are targeting but could also be that your bids are simply too low! Your total budget will not have an impact on where your ads are placed, that simply limits your daily spend. How much you are bidding on keywords along with the other quality score and ad rank related factors will determine where your ads are placed.

I hope this helps and you are able to improve positioning after analyzing your current performance in the regular AdWords interface!

[Eric_Rohrback]

I wouldn't recommend using AW express because you lose most control over the account. There's no telling where your ads will show up because you don't control the bids, can't effectively manage keywords, and can't modify the settings appropriately on campaigns to really focus on ads. I've always said AW express is like playing blackjack, but letting the dealer decide your hand for your. Adwords is the primary revenue stream for Google's business, so they're not in it to make you the best ROI but to keep you happy enough to keep spending money with them. Increasing the monthly spend won't help your ads move up, the only way to do that is optimize the campaign. It's not just if you bid more you'll show higher. It all depends on quality score for the keywords used. If they're broad match with low quality score, then a competitor can theoretically bid lower than you to achieve a higher position if their keyword has a better QS. You will really never know what's going wrong or how to fix your campaign if you use AW express.

My advice is to ditch AW express and actually manage your campaigns. If you don't have the time to learn, then hire someone who already knows it.