Every advertiser cares about their ad position. Each change in your ad position can have a positive or negative impact on your cost, clickthrough rate and most importantly, on the conversions you want to achieve using more optimized ad positions.
The average ad position is currently available as a metric used by advertisers in the Google Ads search campaigns. It shows where your ad is displayed when compared with other ads of other advertisers participating in the auction. For example, if your ad position is 1, this means your ad shows ahead of all other ads, but it doesn’t mean the ad was at the very top of the page, Google says.
Source: support.google.com
In order to make it easier, Google is rolling out four new metrics to provide clear insights on where your ads are appearing on the search results page:
- Impr. (Absolute Top) % – the percent of your ad impressions that are shown as the very first ad above the organic search results.
- Impr. (Top) % – the percent of your ad impressions that are shown anywhere above the organic search results.
- Search (Absolute Top) IS – the impressions you’ve received in the absolute top location (the very first ad above the organic search results) divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location.
- Search (Top) IS – the impressions you’ve received in the top location (anywhere above the organic search results) compared to the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location.
According to Google, if you are using an average position to understand the location of your ads on the page, it’s better to use Impression (Absolute Top) % and Impression (Top) %, on the other hand, if you are using average position to bid to a page location, it’s better to use Search (Abs Top) IS and Search (Top) IS.
As always, every advertiser must test these new metrics and only after that we might have a better insight into ad position.