How are the Ads Positioned in Adwords?

A very frequent question among those who start with Adwords is to know what are the parameters by which the positions of the ads are decided on the results pages of the search network, in this article

Ad Rank and Quality Score

Ad Rank is the score that decides the position of an ad each time an ad qualifies to show in search results, the ad with the highest Ad Rank is the one that gets the best position.

This score is calculated by multiplying the maximum CPC by the Quality Score. (This can help you in Google Adwords Professional exam 😉)

In the example, ad 2 is the one that takes the first position for more than it pays less per click than ad 1.

On the other hand, even though ad 3 is the one that is willing to pay more for each click, it takes the last position due to its low Quality Score.

Sometimes an ad with a low Quality Score can even be penalized and not show at all, for this to happen there usually have to be serious relevance problems between the keywords, the content of the ads and the landing page.

This was a very brief explanation of how the Adwords system decides the position of the ads in the SERPs, in future articles I will expand the information on the factors that influence the cost per click and specific techniques to improve the Quality Score.