Anyone who’s ever had the slightest dealings with PPC (or SEO) will understand the importance of position, or more particularly Ad position. At the moment on Google, an Ad averaging position 1 – 4 will be seen at the top of the page, anything below that is at the bottom of the page. Simple.
What about Google Shopping though? It’s not as straight forward. Generally speaking Google shows 5 Ads at the top of the page (yes, sometimes it’s 10 on the right side, but let’s not over-complicate the complicated) but makes no public comment or distinction as to which is position 1 or 5. You’d be inclined to think that position 1 is on the left (in English speaking countries) but maybe it’s the right, or the middle?
To understand your Ad position in a Google Shopping campaign to some extent, or to at least influence your bid strategy the place you must visit is the Dimensions tab, where the column Search IS Lost (Rank) will give you an idea of if you are bidding too little (possibly) or too much (unlikely).
What about Bing and the magic number 8 though?
Well, when Bing introduced their own Shopping platform it’s probably fair to say they ‘borrowed’ an idea or two from Google. But one idea they had of their own was to include average positions within Bing Shopping campaigns. Go to a Shopping campaign and the average position is displayed and it was verbally confirmed to the writer by a Bing employee that they do indeed count position top left as number 1, down to position 8 bottom right.
So to answer why the magic number is 8, that’s the number which you either want to match or lower in the average position column to ensure your campaign is displaying as much as possible.
Posted by
Gerard McHugh
Gerard McHugh - PPC Expert based in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire UK
Gerard has spent the best part of ten years working on Pay Per Click Marketing campaigns for companies operating in the UK and USA. He is AdWords Certified in Search, Display and Shopping and a Bing Certified Professional.
