Organic Rank Tracker That Includes Average Adwords Position?

Hi consultant1027,

That assumption is not true in most cases. Google did a study a while back that found that approximately 86% of the traffic from ads placed where you already ranked #1 in organic did not overlap with your organic traffic. So you may indeed be losing a lot of valuable traffic to competitors ads in many situations if you abandon those ad positions to your competitor's ads.

Limit Losses, Not Profits

A second point is that you have absolutely no need to limit an ad budget once you have optimized you ad performance and are running profitable campaigns. Limiting your ad budget only serves to limit your total profit. Please explain how that would benefit anyone except your competitors? Stop limiting ad spend on profitable campaigns, you are just shooting yourself in the foot.


It's Not The Tool, But How You Use It

Much of the data you seek can be obtained by linking your AdWords account to Google analytics. Also helpful to link your Search Console account to the same Google analytics account.

Between the AdWords custom Reports and the Google analytics dashboards and custom reports there isn't much that you cannot get data on.

As with most professions, it is not so much the tool, but how you use it that matters. You have all the tools you need provided by Google, just set things up the way you need and Bob's your uncle.

Regarding the issue of average data, you can mitigate the problem of only seeing averages by better account structure and search term targeting and additional use of ValueTrack parameters that include the ad position custom parameter.

Search Terms, Not Keywords

Proper account structure is crucial to campaign optimization, especially regarding the issue of targeting ad positions and locations. By focusing on account structure that provides highly consitent ad positions the data becomes more meaningful, more useful for optimizations and allows for gathering better insights.

Try to remember that it is "search terms" not keywords that you need to optimize. Getting highly consitent ad positions for every important search term is crucial to the optimization process. That should be a major part of your account structure decisions and strategy for optimizations. The Search Terms report is your friend and will provide a lot of that particular data.

Science Is Your Friend

Marketing is a science and marketing experiments, like all scientific method, requires the control of variables to get accurate and useful data. Account structure decisions are your primary tool for limiting those variables. When you structure and manage your campaigns in a way that limits variations, you get more useful data and insights.

Doing things like avoiding broad match terms and limiting traffic from phrase match terms by adding exact match targeting for all important search terms helps. As does making bid adjustments with the idea of maintaining a very consitent ad position for the duration of an experiment.

Marketing is all about the getting the right message, to the right people, at the right moment. Making the best marketing decisions requires good data. Getting good data requires discipline in sticking to the principles of scientific method.

HTH,

Don Burk