Ad Rank is what Google works out, every time somebody searches, to decide whose ad shows and in what order. It is not your bid. It is your bid taken together with how good Google expects the ad to be — whether the keyword, the ad and the page it lands on answer the search — and with what your extensions are likely to add.
On an ordinary account you can answer a weak Ad Rank with money. On a grant account you cannot: the maximum cost per click is $2 unless the campaign is on a smart bidding strategy, and everybody bidding against you knows it. What is left is the other half of the calculation, which is why a grant account lives or dies on relevance rather than on budget.
What a low Ad Rank actually costs
It costs position, and position costs clicks. An ad below the fold is seen and not clicked, which is impressions without clicks — and impressions without clicks is a falling click-through rate, which on a grant account is the number the programme measures you by.
- Raise the ceiling: Google names Maximize conversions, Target CPA and Target ROAS as the strategies that may bid over the programme's $2 maximum where the account's performance merits it — each of which needs conversion tracking that works first.
- Raise the quality: tighter ad groups, keywords the ad actually answers, and a landing page about the thing searched for rather than the home page.
- Stop paying for searches you did not want, with negatives, so the clicks you do get come from people the ad was written for.
Google does not publish the formula and the numbers change per auction. Treat Ad Rank as a direction to push in, not a figure to calculate.
Questions people ask
Can I see my Ad Rank?
No. Google reports the things that feed it — Quality Score per keyword, impression share and the share lost to rank — and those are what you work with.
Does bidding the full $2 fix a weak position?
Rarely, and it is the first thing most accounts try. At the ceiling you are matched against advertisers with no ceiling, so the part of the calculation you can still move is quality.
Where does the agent come into this?
It reads the account and writes the change — the negatives, the ad group split, the bid strategy — as a proposal. Nothing is applied until a specialist reads it and applies it, which on a grant account is the point.