It’s no surprise when Google makes a sudden change in one of their platforms because it happens all the time. This change, however, has me asking bigger questions behind the ‘Why?’ and what that could mean not just for Google Ads, but for rankings in the Google search results.
Average position sunset begins the week of September 30th, 2019
Building on Google’s announcement in February, they’re removing the “average position” metric from Google Ads starting the week of September 30.
Moving forward, Google recommends using Search absolute top impression rate and Search top impression rate. Rather than the position of your ads compared to others, these metrics reflect the actual placement of your ads on the page.
Due to this change, the following will be disabled starting the week of September 30, 2019:
- Rules using average position
- Saved filters with average position
- Custom columns using average position
- Saved reports that filter on average position
If you’re using Google Ads scripts that use avg. position, Google recommends to review them to ensure they’ll continue working as previously intended.
The “average position” metric will also be removed from the following:
- Saved column sets
- Scorecards that use average position in dashboards
- Saved reports that use the average position column, but don’t filter on it
If you use ValueTrack parameters, please note the {adposition} parameter will begin returning an empty string starting the week of September 30, 2019.
Will this effect other Google platforms?
This is the question I keep asking myself. Let’s say the reasons above really were the only motivation behind this change. If you’re familiar with Google, they don’t exactly reveal it all when it comes to change. Partially because they probably don’t know (self learning AI algorithms) or partially because there truly is a different reason they’re either not allowed to tell us yet, if at all.
No, this is not a conspiracy theory post about Google, this has been experienced with professional SEO experts throughout the industry. Google makes a change, we (SEO industry) ask questions, we get ambiguous answers. You can see this throughout twitter conversations between Google bigwigs and SEO specialists. A lot of these conversations are posted on reputable SEO industry websites like Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal.
We will most likely see the end results within the usual 6-12 months, but until then… We wait, we wonder, but we will also always analyze.