On August 12, Google announced that it will begin sunsetting the average position metric the week of September 30.
Back in February, Google said that the average position would be phasing out earlier this year. We will have until the end of September to think about the repercussions of the change and implement updates to any reporting, rules or scripts that use average position.
Google says that advertisers should transition to using the the position metrics (search top impression rate and search absolute top impression rate) introduced last year. Position metrics indicate the percentage of impressions and impression share your ads received in the absolute top and top of page ad slots.
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.
Keep in mind that the {adposition} ValueTrack parameter will begin returning an empty string the week of September 30.
Check out Frederick Vallaeys’ on rethinking bidding strategies and position metrics without average position.