Written by Honcho | Oct 15, 2010 10:42:29 AM
Welcome to our weekly PPC basics blogs. Each week we will be focusing on a different part of PPC and creating a definitive guide to the PPC basics. This week’s focus is Average position (Avg. Pos.)
What is Average Position?
‘Average position’ is a statistic that each of your keywords is ranked on. It shows the average position that your advert ranks when each keyword is searched. This information is shown in the form of a number on your analytics account. The below screenshot shows a Google search for “Football Boots” with PPC results highlighted.
This example shows the different locations of adwords ads on
Google when searching ‘Football Boots’. But what can we see?
- The top 3 PPC results appear above the natural search results.
- Adwords results 4-8 are situated on the right of the page alongside natural searches
Adverts that rank 1-8 will generally appear on the first page of results. This is key as 89% of all Google users do not venture past the first page. Any keywords with an average position of between 9-16 will generally trigger ads on the second page of results, only being seen by just over 10% of Google users. So here is an example of average position in action.
- As you can see here the campaign “Signs & Symptoms” currently has a page rank of 1.7, let’s test this by doing 10 searches for the relevant keywords and see what results we get.
- With the above keywords I have made the below table showing the advert position from 10 searches and the average position of those 10 searches.
- These results are slightly different from those that adwords suggests but over a larger selection of data I’m sure these averages will be the same as that on adwords.
So how can you improve your average rankings? Coming soon will be my blog on how ads are ranked and how to improve your ad ranking! Why not check out some of our current PPC basics blogs in the mean time including
account structure and
quality score.