Prepare to say goodbye to average position in Google Ads on September 30

We knew it was coming. Now we know when. Google announced Monday that it will begin sunsetting the average position metric the week of September 30.

Why we should care

Google said in February that average position would be phasing out earlier this year. Now, we have about 6 weeks to fully absorb the repercussions of the change and implement updates to any reporting, rules or scripts that use average position.

In lieu of average position, Google says advertisers should transition to using the the position metrics — search top impression rate and search absolute top impression rate — introduced last year. These indicate the percentage of impressions and impression share your ads received in the absolute top (the first ad at the very top of the page) and top of page (above the organic results) ad slots.

More on the news

• The following functions will be disabled beginning the week of September 30: Rules using average position, Custom columns using average position, Saved reports that filter on average position, Saved filters with average position.
• Average position will be removed from any saved column sets, saved reports that use the average position column, but don’t filter on it and scorecards that use average position in dashboards.
• Also note the {adposition} ValueTrack parameter will start returning an empty string the week of September 30.
• Related reading: Frederick Vallaeys’ on rethinking bidding strategies and position metrics without average position.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day to day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin writes about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.