Google have just announced that they will be ending Average Position as a metric in Google Ads in September this year.
You can read the announcement here: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9263492
It is going to be a sad day indeed!
What does it mean for advertisers on Google Ads?
For anyone using Manual Cost Per Click (CPC) bidding, the negative impact will be massive.
You’ll no longer know if your ads are in position 1, 2 or 3 – all you’ll see is a generic measure called “Impression (Absolute Top) %” and “Impression (Top)%”.
Efficient and effective manual bid optimisation focuses on adjusting bids based on exact position, factoring in recent performance levels. This allows the SEM analyst to control bidding, drive more quality traffic and decrease lower quality traffic at an individual keyword level.
With the sun setting on the Average Position metric, this will no longer be possible…
The Rise of the Robots
Google have been encouraging (or even pushing) agencies to adopt automated bid strategies for the last 18 months. Despite this push, we’ve always resisted – in the few experiments where we ran automated vs manual, manual ALWAYS came out on top in terms of performance.
Now we’re losing a key pillar in manual bid optimisation, essentially forcing our hand into automated bidding. While manual bid optimisation may still be possible to some extent with these new metrics, we won’t have the same level of granularity or control as we currently have.
What can we still optimise for?
If we take away granular manual bid control, how else can we dial up the good and decrease the bad? In no particular order of impact, we can still:
- Pause poor performing ad variants
- Write new and improved ad variants
- Demographic data (bid down/block poor segments and upweight segments that are performing well)
- Manage campaign-level budget distribution (put more money into better performing campaigns)
- Pause poor performing keywords
- Add negative keywords, and
- Use automated bid strategies.
What will this mean?
Only time will tell how it all plays out – as we say goodbye to Average Position, we’ll be watching eagerly to see if a manual approach will continue to work or if we’ll have to adopt a more automated approach to optimisation and account management.
Let us know your thoughts and how you think the change will impact your campaigns in the comments section!