Getting the top spot is not always the right strategy to adopt for your PPC campaign. Before investing more money into your search network campaigns, you need to be able to identify the most profitable ad slots. Not doing so will mean a smaller ROI; more money spent, less money earned.

In this post, I will be taking you through step by step on how to identify the most profitable ad position for your campaign.

Case study:

I advertise on the search network for a set of 200 keywords and I only do text ads. I spend a lot of money per month and want to know where in the search results my profitability is, as well as what my sale volume is. There are two different types of sales I can get; 1000 sales that generate £1 profit each, and you can also have 100 sales that generate £50 each.

It’s no brainer which one is preferable, but how can I identify these in Google Analytics?

1. Go to “Custom Report” and build this exact custom report:

2. Select a long time frame to have a better idea. Three months is a good starting point in order to see some sale trends.
3. Hit save and you should get a report like this:

4. Select all rows via the drop down at the bottom:

5. Export the data set into a CSV:

6. Open your excel sheet and get rid of all ‘Not Set’ ad slot keywords if you have any.
You should now see:

7. Create a pivot table for the figures to talk:

8. Organise your pivot table as the following:

This way, you can quickly see the revenue for the specific ad slot.

In my example, I can now see that:

Great stuff. I now know that the position 1.5 or above (which is top spot) is generating the most of the revenue. And logically, this colour scale shows us that the revenue diminishes accordingly to lower ad position.

Let’s now look at the converted clicks and the volume of these sales beyond the revenue.
Open your google AdWords and do the following:

1) Go to the keywords tab to show all the keyword and then custom your column in order to show the converted clicks and average ad position within your report.

2) Apply those custom columns and now you should be able to see your new columns within your table.

Like in Google Analytics, make sure to select a 3 months period at least to have some proper insights.

3) Download this table into a CSV

It’s spreadsheet time again!

4) Get rid of all columns a part from ‘Keyword’, ‘Avg. Position’ and ‘Converted clicks’. You are now in front of something like that:

Same principle as above, create a pivot table where you’ll organise it as the following:

5) Go to the Ad Slot column and right click on the first cell (A3 in my example), select ‘Group’ and custom it as the following:

A nice colour scale and again, you are able to quickly see where the converted click volume is. In my situation, it’s clearly obvious that the sale volume comes from position #2.5-#3

Example of ‘where’ position #2.5 - #3 is:

Time to conclude.

Now, a simple copy-paste to put the two pivot tables next to each other should tell us if the sale volume ad position matches the revenue ad position.
In my example…

Well well well… It really looks like focusing on position #2.5-#3 is a waste of energy as it doesn’t bring that much revenue (£14,125.80). On the other hand, the sale volume on the ad position #1 with 1551 converted clicks is generating a huge part of my revenue (£191,312.94).

With this date, I can see that it’s time concentrate on the top spot ads #1 and increase even more my revenue. Improving the ad copy to boost your CTR is the first step, but don’t forget to look at your margin and then you’ll be able to show your best margin products at #1 by adjusting your Cost-per-clicks accordingly to finally boost your ROI.

If it all seems a bit confusing (spreadsheets, we know!), get in touch and we can talk to you about the PPC services we offer.