While going over the settings from a German campaign, I stumbled upon the "position preferences" option. This allows you to specify to Google in which position or range of positions you want to appear in the paid search results. Great! I thought. Let's set up all the keywords to be in position 1-6, since going any lower is just a waste of time.
However, I found 2x problems. The first was that I found no way, besides going in one keyword at a time, to adjust this. Nothing in the web interface, and nothing in the AdWords Editor. So, before sending an email asking Susana to do this across all our campaigns, I started reading about people using it. Apparently, there are a lot of circumstances where it simply doesn't work at all, and Google even specifically says that this option is only a "suggestion", not a guarantee.
Well, since we always rank well anyway, I decided to skip the work.