Google has announced the discontinuation of the average position feature
Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2025 7:07 am
Google Ads recently announced that it will be retiring average position, one of its original search metrics, in September of this year.
What is average position? When you compete in the Google Ads ad auction, your ad is assigned a rank based on your bid and Quality Score. Ad position, in turn, determines where your ads appear in paid search results – it determines the location of your ad.
Ad position refers to the arrangement morocco phone number data of paid search results , not the placement of paid search results. In other words, if you achieve the highest ad position in a given auction, it doesn't necessarily mean your ad will appear at the top of the SERP. It could also appear within an ad unit below the organic search results.
Average position doesn’t tell you everything about where your ads are appearing in search, so it’s no wonder this metric has often been perceived as misleading.
Why did Google decide to remove the average position metric?
In short, Google felt that this metric was not very useful to Google Ads users, so last November it introduced a number of new metrics related to ad auction performance and ad visibility in the SERP:
Top Impression Percentage – This indicates the percentage of your total impressions that occur at the top of the SERP (above the organic results). Top Impression Percentage is calculated as the number of impressions at the top of the page divided by the total number of impressions.
Top impression percentage tells you the percentage of impressions that are at the very top of the search results. Top impression percentage is calculated as the number of times an ad appears in position 1 of the search results divided by the total number of impressions.
What is average position? When you compete in the Google Ads ad auction, your ad is assigned a rank based on your bid and Quality Score. Ad position, in turn, determines where your ads appear in paid search results – it determines the location of your ad.
Ad position refers to the arrangement morocco phone number data of paid search results , not the placement of paid search results. In other words, if you achieve the highest ad position in a given auction, it doesn't necessarily mean your ad will appear at the top of the SERP. It could also appear within an ad unit below the organic search results.
Average position doesn’t tell you everything about where your ads are appearing in search, so it’s no wonder this metric has often been perceived as misleading.
Why did Google decide to remove the average position metric?
In short, Google felt that this metric was not very useful to Google Ads users, so last November it introduced a number of new metrics related to ad auction performance and ad visibility in the SERP:
Top Impression Percentage – This indicates the percentage of your total impressions that occur at the top of the SERP (above the organic results). Top Impression Percentage is calculated as the number of impressions at the top of the page divided by the total number of impressions.
Top impression percentage tells you the percentage of impressions that are at the very top of the search results. Top impression percentage is calculated as the number of times an ad appears in position 1 of the search results divided by the total number of impressions.