Introduction
Your ad competes with other ads each time there’s an opportunity to be seen by a good prospect — and the winner isn’t simply the highest bidder. Google’s ad auction works to help the most useful ads for viewers get the most visible spots on the page. This course explains how to win better ad placements by making your ad more useful to your customers.
What you’ll learn:
What factors influence ad placement
What you can do to make your ads seen
What would you do?
You’re trying to explain to a co-worker how Google Ads works, and they ask you what determines whether an ad shows up in the top placement or the fifth. What factors contribute to Ad Rank?
Making your ads seen
Now, those are a lot of factors! Your bid, the impact of ad formats you have enabled, your ad’s expected clickthrough rate (CTR), ad relevancy, and finally, the landing page experience when users click on your ad — these are all influential. And to understand their influence, we’ll start by taking a look at the Google Ads auction — the system responsible for taking all these factors into consideration and ultimately deciding your ad’s position and even whether it shows up at all.
The Google Ads auction
The Google Ads auction is the process that happens with each Google search. It decides which ads will appear for that specific search, which order those ads will show on the page, and how much the advertiser (that’s you!) will pay for that placement.
The Google Ads auction in motion
Let’s follow the Google Ads auction as it takes on a user search.
Each time a search is performed, the Google Ads auction is ready for the challenge — deciding whether to display ads and if so, how to rank them on a page. So, imagine someone were to enter the search term “cool boys’ sneakers”. What does the ad auction do now?
This is where things get interesting! Let’s see how the system makes that determination in three steps. Cast a wide net to find relevant ads The Google Ads system finds all ads whose keywords match that search.
Pare down to eligible ads only from those ads, the system ignores any that aren't eligible, like ads that target a different country or are disapproved.
Show only ads that meet the Ad Rank threshold of the remaining ads, only those with a sufficiently high Ad Rank may show. Remember all those factors which can influence Ad Rank? It’s a combination of your bid, ad quality, landing page experience, and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats. With the Ad Rank threshold met and the order carefully determined, the system ensures a display of ads that are truly relevant, a benefit to both users who seek information and advertisers (that’s you again) who want to present ads that are most likely to lead to clicks. Now, that’s good value for all!
Making your ads seen: The influential factors
Now that you’re familiar with how the auction works, let’s take a closer look at how all those factors can work together to influence your ad winning a prominent placement.
First there’s your bid amount.Not to be confused with the amount a click on your ad actually costs, this is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a user to click on your ad and visit your site. To ensure good value for all, top bids don’t necessarily lead to top rank on the search results page. As it is becoming pretty clear by now, there are a number of other factors that the auction considers to make that determination!
Ad relevancy is calculated by analyzing the language in your ad to determine how well it relates to the search query. Ad relevancy is a key factor in the auction process, enabling users to see only useful ads that are relevant to the search performed.
Expected clickthrough rate (CTR) is the prediction of how often your ad will get clicked when shown for a keyword. To determine this rate, Google Ads takes into account how well your keyword has performed, that is, how users responded to your ad by clicking on it or not in the past.
Ad formats, like those that include various ad extensions, may influence rank as well. For example, using various ad extensions, like a sitelink to a page on your website, your address, or phone number, may serve to bolster your rank.
An ad is only useful if its landing page helps a user find what they’re looking for! A positive landing page experience:
Includes relevant and original content that helps the user complete their task
Is easily navigable
Articulates your business clearly
The Quality Score
So, we’ve looked at how the Google Ads auction works to consider many of these factors to identify and reward quality ads — those that are estimated to perform better by giving people who click on them exactly what they’re looking for quickly and effortlessly come out on top!
So how can you get a general sense of which ads might be of higher quality? One estimate is your Quality Score. Quality Score is the 1-10 rating that is reported for each keyword in your account calculated by estimating the quality of your ads and their associated landing pages.
A high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad and landing page are relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.
Ad Rank
Okay, so let’s get back to Ad Rank — that value that's used to determine your ad placement, and even eligibility, based in part on that Quality Score. Remember, ads with the highest Ad Rank get the most desirable placements on the page.
Ad ranking in action
Clearly, a lot goes into determining your ad placement and even eligibility. Here, we’ll look at four advertiser’s hypothetical bids, ad quality, and anticipated ad format impact to see just how their Ad Rank shakes out.
Here are four advertisers competing for space in search results. Each is bidding in increments of $1 to pay for a user to click.
But, naturally, their ads have different quality, from low to high! Remember those factors that can impact quality — things like ad relevancy, the landing page experience, and that expected clickthrough rate, are all inputs affecting quality. Here’s how they stack up from low to high.
When it comes to how ads rank, however, another factor at play is the impact of various ad formats.
With the expected format impact factored into the mix, an Ad Rank is calculated for each advertiser. Remember, this is the score that determines the position in the results page, but let’s not forget only ads that have sufficient rank are eligible to appear at all. Which advertiser do you think might not appear?
Let’s see just who’s getting to the top of the search results page. This is where quality and formats come into serious play! The ads with the highest rank display at the top in order of priority — and that advertiser who was willing to bid up to $4 a click actually won’t be eligible to display ads at all! With a score that low, the auction will simply elect to not show the ads.
How’s that for a ranking system! Remember: 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. Auctions are ongoing for every search on Google — and each one can have potentially different results depending on the competition at that moment. So you may see fluctuation in your ad's position on the page and even whether your ad shows at all.
Recap
In this course, you learned about the different factors that influence your ad’s position on the page and strategies for improving your Ad Rank and Quality Score.
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