Although I've never sold real estate I have been told by numerous agents that, when it comes to real estate, it's all about location ... location ... location. For them it's not so much what the house might look like but where the house is situated that counts.

So you can have a mansion in a less affluent part of town but, despite all its bedrooms, garages, spas, pools and fittings, it may not be worth as much as far more modest house in the very best part of town is worth.

Now you might think that almost immutable law of real estate might apply to other things as well and I'm sure it does. For example if you were operating a used car lot you would want to have it on a main road where everyone can see what you're selling and you certainly wouldn't want to have it hidden away in some little backstreet that hardly anyone every drove down.

In organic search engine listings we all know that you really do need to be at least in the top five on the search engine results page or the amount of traffic you get from the search engines is going to be way down. In fact you really do need to be in the top one or two if you want to attract the most number of hits from the search engines.

Years ago, when Google was much slower in updating their algorithm, I was competing with a friend of ours for the top position for 'hot porn'. We shared our stats and every time he took the top spot and I dropped to second spot the difference in traffic was amazing.

Every time my site spent a month in the second spot my traffic numbers would be down by several thousand and that drop in traffic would disappear when my site bounced back to the top spot. Our friend's traffic rose and fell depending on where his site was listed too.

So you would think that it's vitally important to be in the best position for everything but according to Google nailing that top spot in AdWords listings doesn't matter so much. It seems that Google has been watching ad placement in paid listings on a wide range of search engine results pages and there has been very little variation in conversion rates regardless of what position the ad appears.

Google's testing suggests that an ad that is well-written and focused on the search term that it appears for will do almost as well in position five or lower as it will do if it appeared in the top position.

That's certainly interesting when you consider the need to be at the top of the organic search results and the importance of position when it comes to just about every other type of marketing in the real world.

So if some of your marketing is done via AdWords how does position affect your conversion rates? Do you really know? Are you checking your stats and watching conversions or are you simply doing what one of our clients did after he had us write two AdWords ads for his business?

If you're like him then you won't be watching your stats and conversions at all ... all you will be doing is throwing large amounts of money at Google to ensure that your ad stays in the top one or two positions.

If you haven't tried AdWords before then definitely don't approach it the way our client did. Instead look at the traffic you're getting and the conversions because you could be wasting a heck of a lot of money trying to nail that top spot ... and if Google is right about position not having a great impact on conversions ... then you don't have to.

Instead of getting into a crazy bidding war for the top spot ... for a single word term like 'porn' where you might have to score as many as 260 sales a day at $35.00 commission just to break even ... you may do better if you settle for a position further down the AdWords column. But then again conversion rates may not be the same in adult as they are for mainstream businesses. I guess you'll never know till you try

And before I go there's something else that you need to keep in mind if you're going to dabble in AdWords advertising. We humans are competitive by nature and sometimes that competitiveness can reach insane levels and I'm sure that there's no where better to see how insane things can get than in an auction.

When you're advertising using AdWords you are in an auction and it's very easy to get carried away and want to outbid everyone else regardless of the cost. If you tend to get carried away in an auction environment then make sure that you have you're break-even point printed out and stuck to your monitor so you can see at what point your bids go from being good business-sense to total insanity.

So I hope I've given you something to think about ... right now I'm off to see a client about something far removed from Adwords and the Internet ... fortunately Steve has written training courses before and we might just have what it takes to make this client very happy.

07/30/2010 - Unique Selling Points and Other Things

07/28/2010 - Go Hard or Go Home

07/26/2010 - Keeping it Simple

07/21/2010 - Are You Stuck in the Past?

07/16/2010 - This and That on a Friday

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