Google’s Average Position Metric is Sunsetting Soon

The sunsetting of average position is finally here and it’s time to ensure that your team is up to date on when the changes will happen and what your team will do.

Didn’t know that Google is sunsetting average position? Check out our blog post that will tell you everything you need to know. Once you get caught up, below are a few important dates as well as PMG’s advice for life after average position.

August 15th — Bid to position bid strategies in SA360 will be deprecated on Thursday of this week. Any campaigns currently using this bid strategy will automatically be transitioned over to equivalent impression share bid strategies.

The metric will be removed from the Google UI in September and historical data will be available in SA360 per the standard data retention policies. 

Download campaign level prominence metrics to have an understanding of how they correlate to the average position. Setting a range, i.e. an ATIS of 80-90% equates roughly to 1.1, will allow you to more effectively prep.

Utilizing the Impression Share bid strategies can be an effective stand-in for average position based bid strategies, and understanding your campaign’s prominence metrics can allow you to more effectively set a goal while minimizing the impact on CPCs.

If you have wholesaler agreements in place, updating them to restrict wholesalers to bid to 0% ATIS is an easy stand-in for historically bidding to 0.

If you haven’t thought about how to adapt to a post-average position world, the deadline is approaching quickly. Doing a little prep-work now will allow your campaigns to transition smoothly to the new metrics with a minimal learning curve.

Best of luck!