Devendra's SEO Diary

What is the Google Ads Auction & How Ad Rank determines your Ad Position?

You’ve created your text ad, set your budget, and now you're ready to see it live on Google Search. But how do you know your ad will show up? And what position will it have on the results page? Enter the ad auction — Google’s way of deciding which ads will show and how they’re positioned.

How to describe the ads auction system, learn about how Ad Rank determines your ad position, and identify the three factors that impact ad quality.

💥 How Ad Rank determines your Ad Position? 💥

Google Ads calculates Ad Rank for every ad in the auction. Ad Rank determines your ad position and whether your ads are eligible to show at all. Generally speaking, the ad with the highest Ad Rank gets to show in the top position, and the ad with the second highest Ad Rank gets to show in the second position (assuming the ads clear the relevant thresholds), and so on.

At a high level, think of Ad Rank as having five factors.

Bid : When you set your bid, you're telling Google Ads the maximum amount you're willing to pay for a click on your ad. You often actually end up paying less, and you can change your bid at any time.

Ad rank threshold: To help ensure high-quality ads, we set minimum quality thresholds that an ad must achieve to show in a particular ad position.

Context of query: With the ad auction, context matters. When calculating Ad Rank, we look at the search terms the person has entered, the person’s location at the time of the search, the type of device they’re using (e.g., mobile or desktop), the time of the search, the nature of the search terms, other ads and search results that show on the page, and other user signals and attributes.

Ad extensions impact: When you create your ad, you have the option to add extra information to your ad, such as a phone number, or more links to specific pages on your site. These are called ad extensions. Google Ads estimates how extensions and other ad formats you use will impact your ad's performance.

Auction-time ad quality: Google Ads also looks at how relevant and useful your ad and the website it links to are to the person who'll see it. Quality Score is an aggregated estimate of our assessment of the quality of your ad.

💥 The three main factors that determine the quality of an Ad 💥

Advertisers only pay when they actually receive a click on their ad; their order isn’t just based on bids. Why? We want to show more useful ads in a higher position on the search results page. Find out which factors help determine the quality of an ad.

Posted By Devendra Prakash Jaiswal
11:50 AM