Since September 30th, 2019, Google Ads has deprecated the metric Average Position (read more about it here), and has replaced it with two new metrics:

In April 2021, Microsoft Ads also deprecated Average position (read more about it here).

We removed all references to ‘average position’. Even if you do nothing, your scheduled reports will continue to be delivered uninterrupted to your clients and stakeholders.

Charts in reports that use the average position metric will become charts with no data. This will not break your ability to view or share these reports but it may not look great so we recommend removing these charts.

Any strategies that use the ‘average position’ metric will no longer work until you remove all references to ‘average position’.

For Google Ads, we added new prebuilt strategies in Rule Engine that illustrate how to use the new metrics, ‘Impr. (Top) %’ and ‘Impr. (Abs Top) %’, to target different positions for your ads.

All optimizations will continue to offer suggestions based on our algorithms. However, you will no longer see a value for ‘average position’ if you have enabled this column in a view for optimization. If you’re using average position in any custom filters in optimizations they will stop working. If you’re using custom filters that use average position in workouts, the workouts will throw an error so we recommend updating custom filters to not use them.

Rules-based strategies in our geo and device bid adjustment tools will no longer work with ‘average position’ but we have the new metrics for top impression % available to replace it.

As part of our algorithms for Manual Bidding tools or Insights such as PPC Investigator, we are computing our own Estimated Average Position based on a heuristic using impression share, top impression share vs. average position. That is why you might see a reference to it in some of our tools.

The Optmyzr Rule Engine can still be used to change bids (amongst many other things it can automate) based on position goals. Instead of using the ‘average position’, you can use one of the newer metrics like ‘Impr. (Top) %’ or ‘Impr. (Abs Top) %’.

For example, instead of checking for ‘Avg. position > 1’, you could check if ‘Impr. (Abs Top) % < 90’.

With the deprecation of average position, Microsoft Ads introduced the position metrics, which you can find available to work with in the Rule Engine: