It is always a charm to get your ads on the absolute top position on Google SERPs but it may not work with anyone, all the time.
Then how exactly to get the ad show on the absolute top position at result pages?
So, in the wake of this crucial question arising why ads are not showing at the absolute top position on the SERPs but it is always showing “Not Applicable”; any help that can solve this issue?
Of course, there are several proven solutions that can drastically help to secure the absolute top position in Google Ads.
What are they? Let me be a ‘quickie’ to share them all with you.
The Wrongs in Trying to Secure Absolute Top Position in Google Ads
Going straight to fiddling with bidding strategy;
- By maximizing the conversions or clicks,
- And, then increasing the budget
While they look okay to practice as a strategy, in reality, they actually are not. They are just doing it all wrong.
Then What’s the Correct Strategy to Get the Ads Showing on Absolute Top Position?
While adjusting with the bidding strategy with the above two steps seems correct to practice, they could work in a few cases but not all the time.
What’s the correct one which we suggest is the following by doing all the steps live;
Pick Ad Group, Campaign, All Campaign, Account to Reach Settings
First off, select your running ad group that you wish to go with.
Now, pick any “Campaign” from the tab and then click on “All Campaigns”.
For example, we selected the first campaign from the already-running campaigns, and then headed to the “All Campaigns” tab.
Pick an account associated with that campaign.
And picked the “Campaign” running with that account.
Click on “Settings” from the left-pane, and you would get to see the page like the screen-shot.
Play-Up with Bidding
Now head and click on “Bidding”.
Click on “Change Bid Strategy”.
From the drop down of “What do you want to focus on?”, change from anything to “Impression share”.
On the next drop down of “Where do you want your ads to appear”, pick “Absolute top of results page”.
And enter “100%” from the drop-down list of “Percentage (%) impression share to target”.
This will help your ads to secure the absolute top position on search over all the competitors targeting/showing their ads under your category.
You will also have to set a higher CPC budget limit or amount to be added over here “Maximum CPC bid limit” at the start. Although, you can reduce the budget later.
Winning the Top by Improving Quality Score But How?
Well, I strongly suggest you to extensively work on SKAG (single keyword ad group), so it means that you are going to create a new ad for every given keyword which will eventually help to improve your quality score.
And if possible, you also need to have a dedicated landing page to every keyword, or for a group of keywords targeting those keywords and the theme.
Because that will initiate Google a message of acute relevancy that our website is quite relevant to that ad. And why we stress to do is, when you have a higher relevance, your quality score will definitely improve. And once your quality score improves, your CPC cost will go down.
And when the CPC cost goes down, it will be far easier for you to maintain the absolute top result of the page because if it’s still 100 and you are not able to get the most out of being at the absolute top position, then your CPC is not performing okay.
Changes Will Definitely Take Time. Show Some Patience!
There is also one important thing that I want to tell you that in case if you change your campaign from maximize conversion or any other type to Absolute top of the results page, you will have to patiently wait for this campaign for up to 48 hours for the changes to take effect.
It is not like you change the campaign and start seeing the traffic coming right away. You will have to wait because with every different campaign type and making the changes in them and expecting sudden traffic, no it would not work.
In my personal experience, some campaign types could take around 24 hours, some may take 48 hours, and some may take even longer.
What I usually do for the client is, our team mostly place the campaigns on Friday as we do not usually run ads for majority of clients during weekends (yes, restaurants are exceptions and there are a few case studies where we run them ideally for weekends), but when we are not running the ads, we put such campaigns on Friday so our time does not get wasted, so the changes get propagated/activated by Monday. Even some new campaigns could drag into Tuesday for the traffic to start receiving especially when your website has no data.
So, follow these strategies and let me know how it went for you.
Still No Impressions? How To Investigate Devices and Ad Schedule!
Also look around Ad schedules or any such issue because the question also indicated that you are not getting impressions, and that may triggered due to you might have put your ad on a specific time-frame or check out on your bidding for devices where you may be unwillingly reduced your bidding for devices by 100 percent and not getting traffic at all.
So, it may result in losing the traffic from mobile devices because major sources of traffic are coming from mobile devices, so that could be the real issue here.
For that to check and fix the issue, carefully check on your bidding for devices separately as well.
To be able to do that, go to “Devices” as shown from the screenshot below.
Because people unwillingly do bid adjustment over there which can disturb the flow of traffic coming from mobile devices.
And also check for “Ad schedule” to investigate if your ads are eligible to show for your targeted times or for the majority of times.
So, these can be all of the reasons for your ad not to show on absolute top position even after the changes.
Conclusion
So, these are some of the common issues that I have experienced and tweaked with the solution to fix the problem with your ad not showing on the absolute top position in SERPs.
I believe this would have answered the question in detail. If you have any other question where I can share my two cents, you know from where to ask *hint: comment box* 🙂