Exploring Ad Rank In Google Ads Video Transcription:
Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service, today I am going to talk you through Ad rank in Google Ads. What it means, how you influence it and what it’s made up of.
Ad rank is what is used to determine if and where your ads are shown on Google, compared to other ads.
Ad Rank is made up of the following:
- Your bid amount
- Quality score which is made up of how relevant the ad is to the keyword. Expected click-through rate. Which is estimated when Google looks at previous interactions with that ad and also the impressions it’s had. Google also adjusts for complexities like where on the page the ad is shown and lastly landing page experience. You can and should work to improve these metrics to improve quality score.
- The ad rank thresholds and is the minimum that an ad must achieve in order to show.
- How competitive a particular auction is.
- Variables of the searcher including where they are. The type of device they are using, or the time of day decide to search.
- The rest of the search results.
- Ad extensions and other types of ad formats. Google estimates how the various extensions you have added in your account, will impact your ad’s performance.
Even if your competitors have a higher bid than yours. You can still be in a higher position with a lower bid by using highly relevant keywords and ads.
Your Ad Rank updates each time it is shown in an auction. So the ad position can change depending on competitors, the variables of the searcher and the factors I mentioned previously.
If someone says “Ad rank threshold”. What they are referring to is a reserve price for your ad to show. (a good analogy for this is eBay. An item doesn’t get sold in the auction if the reserve price isn’t met).
If your bid is lower than the threshold, your ad won’t show. This is why you wouldn’t get any clicks for 1p. When no one else is bidding for a term, the ad has a reserve price known as the ad rank threshold.
If none of your competitors ads are eligible to show. The threshold or reserve price is the price that you would pay for that click.
The reserve price is automatically increased to the minimum which can be billed in your country. So I am in the UK, which means it would be to the next penny. This is why an ad can be expensive, even when no other competitors are bidding on it.
Ad rank thresholds are calculated at the time of each auction, based on the following factors:
- Your ads quality. Google wants a good experience for their consumers, so they ensure that lower quality ads have a higher reserve price.
- An ads position in the auction. If your Ad appears higher up the page on Google. It has a higher reserve price than an ad which is lower on the page. That ensures that searchers have a higher probability of seeing more relevant ads near the top positions.
- Again the subjective variables I mentioned previously, like user location and device type.
- The industry or topic the ad is being shown in.
- Similar Auctions or that are closely related. This means that if Ethical Marketing Service bids on the term “google ads management”. The ad rank threshold or reserve price will be influenced by the term “Adwords management”. As they are similar or closely related.
On search, if you want to know how often your ads are at the top of the page. The metric to use is the absolute top impression share and top impression share and these show as a percentage. An example is you are at the top of the page 60% of the time.
Absolute top equates to number 1 position and top impression share is anywhere above the natural results.
If you want to improve these metrics, you can Improve your ad relevance. Your landing page experience or increase your bid or all of these things together.
Hopefully that clears up some confusion around the term ad rank and also ad rank threshold.