Google Ads is Removing the Average Position Metric: What This Means for Your Business

Digital marketing is constantly changing, and it’s important to keep up with the changes that impact the industry. Google, an obvious industry powerhouse, brought changes to their ads platform once again by eliminating the Average Position metric from Google Ads. Their hope is to improve the way that we measure and optimize ads. Here’s what you need to know about the new metrics and how they will impact your business. 

What Was the Average Position Metric?

This metric was used to show the position of one ad compared to other ads in the ad auction. The issue with this metric? It showed your ad’s average position instead of its real position. For example, if you had a position of “1,” this number represented the average position instead of the accurate position. For that reason, Google decided to “sunset” the metric because it wasn’t the best way to measure an ad’s success. 

The New Metrics

The first two metrics are called Search Top Impression rate and Search Absolute Top Impression rate. These metrics will show you the percentage of impressions that your ads received on the search engine result pages. It’s important to mention that Google doesn’t recommend using these metrics to set your bids because the metric may decrease depending on the bids.

The other two metrics are called Search Absolute Top Impression Share and Search Top Impression Share. These metrics show you the impressions that you received in the absolute top locations compared to the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. Google recommends using these two metrics for bidding strategies if your goal is to improve and optimize the placement of your ads. 

Effect of Removing Average Position Metric on Business

Why Should We Care?

According to Pallavi Naresh, Google Ads product manager, “These new metrics give you a much clearer view of your prominence on the page than average position does.” These implementations are going to help us with our bidding strategies and the optimization of ads. Also, this allows our team to have a clearer view of how our ads are currently performing and giving us the possibility to better allocate our budget, ultimately having a positive impact on your business. 

At EM Search Consulting, we are constantly searching for new changes and ideas that Google and other search platforms are bringing to the industry. The launch of these new competitive metrics, Impression Absolute Top and Impression Top, are an example that Google is constantly improving their platform to give us a better experience and be more precise in our strategies when running ads. If you have further questions about Google’s recent changes, please get in touch with your Account Manager.

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