Real position of your PPC ads with Google and Yahoo.

You are doing advertisement in Google and Yahoo and you are targeting all English speaking countries (or you target French and French speaking countries or German or whatever...). From time to time you want to check if your ads are appearing and at what position, so if you are in an English speaking country, you go on Google.com, you type in your favorite keyword and you see your ad on position 1! Great. You are happy! You try again and see here, again position 1! You did a great job. But hold on. Last time you checked you adwords account for the same KW your average position was 3. So you check again and you find out that your account still shows "Avg Pos 3". So why did your ad appear on position 1 when you just checked? Well simply because AdWords gives you an AVERAGE! So you might be on position 1 in one country and on position 5 in another country. So how can you know? Very simple you can use the Google ad preview tool. This is a great tool because you can enter the KW of course but also the language and the country. The language considers the language settings of the user's browser and the country, well it is the country where the user is located. So when you search using this tool you can (almost) see exactly what the user in another country will see and other advantage is that it will not count any impression for this. You might have noticed that I said "almost". This is because Google takes into account habits. So, if some user never clicks on one ad but always clicks on other ads around that specific ad, Google will stop showing it. This is the only thing that the adpreview tool doesn't take into account. The disadvantage is that you need to check KW by KW and location by location. So this is a bit time consuming.

To reduce the impact of average position and if you have the time to handle it you can separate your campaign by destination. So instead of having one campaign for the USA and the UK you will have one campaign for the USA and on campaign for the UK.

So this is for Google. But what about Yahoo? Well yahoo is more complicated and I am not sure we can really rely on their statistics. I remember one case. I was targeting only one language and it was not English. My average position was 3 but whenever I checked Yahoo I was the only one buying the KW therefore my avg pos was supposed to be 1. The problem was that I was not located in a country of the targeted language so maybe I was missing something. However when I raised that issue to Yahoo they came back to me with a very unsatisfying answer. The scary part was that the people I talked to were supposed to know what they are talking about. What I mean is that they were not just any customer service agent.

So, Yahoo doesn't offer such a tool like adpreview and if you are not located in the country you are targeting you can either ask a friend (if you have one) who is there to check for you on what position your ads are showing or you can use a proxy that is located in that country. Here is a site which lists proxies by countries. Unfortunately in the case of Yahoo every impression will be counted.