The most common complaint advertisers have – especially if they have a consultant managing their advertising – is that their ads are not appearing where they want them. There is a very good reason for that: that is simply not how pay per click advertising engines work. Advertisers and their consultants have to let themselves off of this hook because it is not possible to consistently place your ads precisely where you want them. Read on to find out that where you see them is not where they are for everyone else anyway.

Where your ads appear is likely to vary for every search because the factors Google uses to decide which ads appear in which position changes with each search. Every single time someone types in your search phrase Google holds a new “auction” for the positions the ads appear in. Even if the search phrase is exactly the same, the mixes of advertisers bidding on that phrase ARE different and so are many other variables (discussed below).

Here are some variables that affect how many advertisers participate in each search auction:

• Ads being manually paused and resumed
• Using what Google calls Ad Scheduling to designate which days and hours ads are active
• Limiting ad impressions with the Campaign Daily Budget (often unintentionally)
• Geo-targeted ads that only appear when searchers are identified as being in a particular location

Of these, the Daily Budget setting causes the most volatility in where your ads will appear. The more advertisers whose ads appear inconsistently, the more erratic your ad positions will be. This is due to a far greater variation is the quantity of advertisers and the bid amounts you are competing against.

Every search done also affects the historical information Google gathers on each advertiser. That historical information is used in the algorithms so the “equation” used is different every single time your ad is displayed. Finally, Google’s system changes the ads it shows a searcher based on their past search behavior.

Hopefully it is now clear that expecting your ads to appear in the same position for every search is simply not possible.