Hi guys and gals,

I was wondering if you guys tampered with the adwords position preference tool?
It lets you select the position range you wish your ads to appear in (Position 1 to 5 only)

Do you find that this can be risky since somebody can bid on a keyword really high and cause you to exaust your funds quicker or have your ads appear much less throughout the day?

Or do you manage your positioning manually?

If you set position preference to positions 1-5 you will both limit your impressions and clicks and increase your costs. Unless you have very strong statistical evidence that your ads only convert when displayed in those positions I would advise against taking that action.

I have found that using that feature seems to greatly reduce traffic even when I set it to positions 3-10+ or 4-10+ which makes little sense as almost none of the keywords I've used it on would not have far more than 3-4 competitors.

I also find that either it simply does not work or Google Analytics isn't accurate. I have left it set to 3-10+ or 4-10+ for weeks and Google Analytics still indicates that my ads are appearing in positions T1-T3 and 1-3 anyway.

I phoned Google and their Reps tell me that it is supposed to work and ads should only appear in the positions specified. I believe I know why the ads are still appearing in other positions.

I have noted for a long time that keyword phrases that should be blocked by negative keywords from being displayed still get a certain number of impressions. This is more obvious now with the new magnifying glass icon tool.

Ideally, if you have a negative keyword blocking your ads it would block ALL impressions for that ad. That is NOT what happens. Here is my hypothesis on how that could happen:

I have read that Google's system is made up of well over 50,000+ servers all networked together. All networks have technical challenges and it appears to me that theirs allows updates to propagate across most of the servers but not every single server.

Therefore, some percentage of servers don't receive every update we make. One would hope that they would "sync up" later; however, they may not. (We'd have to have some really sharp technical person at Google answer that question.)

I have no evidence that Google ever drops by here and reads what I post; however, just in case, here's a tip for Google: Hire a brilliant LAN DOCTOR to trouble-shoot your network.

When I worked at IBM we had a brilliant guy who could be contracted to diagnose these types of issues. I know there are a few "Top Gun" Lan Doctors around who could find and resolve issues such as this even on networks as complex as Googles.