If you are looking to advertise on Google using Google Adwords, you need to make sure that the ad you are creating doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. Just because you write it and buy the words doesn’t mean that anyone is going to click on it. The most important thing that you can do in an advertising campaign that uses pay-per-click advertisements is to try to get that ad to appear in the top one or two spots in a search engine search results page.  Of course, the importance of this isn’t limited to advertising on Google, but it is a consistent enough example that advertising on Google will be continued to be referenced for the purposes of this post. Remember the mantra: Top Spot on Google.
Although Google doesn’t release the actual figures of where people us pay per click, it is most likely that between 40-50% of users click on the number one link that pops up in Google. This means that if you aren’t the number one paid advertisement, your chances of capturing a customer drop considerably. If you are beyond the top three choices, lazy internet users will probably never see your page at all. AOL confirms this information with their own data, that 40-50% of users click on that first result.
Because of this, it becomes extremely important to create an ad word advertisement that gets seen, and gets to the top of Google listings.  One of the more scientific ways of tracking user interactions with web sites is through the use of heat maps. These maps utilize eye tracking software, that track where a computer users eyes go in a page, and then track where the user clicks. As computer users, are brains are trained to focus in on the top spots, so if your ad does not appear there, you are probably wasting your money. These heat map studies confirm the earlier referenced data indicating that we click on what is at the top. Around 50% of users click on that top listing after our eyes focus on the top few results.
As an advertiser, you should pay attention to what spot your account ends up once you’ve created your ad’s parameters. If you are not getting it listed in the top four, or even the top three spots, you will probably want to reconsider your campaign, and see where you have gone wrong. You don’t want to go through all the trouble and expense of creating a marketing campaign that no one ends up seeing. Once again, this means that you can’t just create an ad campaign and never look at it again. You need to constantly monitor your campaign to see what is working and what is not working. Constant tweaking should improve your rankings, if you respond to the right signals. Luckily, through analytics and watching what happens, you can see which campaigns are succeeding and which are failing. Your next step is to figure out why certain campaigns are attracting those clicks and why others are falling lower and lower in the rankings.
