Average Position has long been a key metric used by advertisers, optimizers, and sales teams alike to evaluate the effectiveness of a paid search campaign. Google’s announcement that the average position metric would be eliminated provided an opportunity to shift our focus to more meaningful metrics: Impression Share, Top Impression Rate, and Absolute Top Impression Rate.
What are they?
Impression Share is the number of impressions your ad received divided by the number of impressions your ad was eligible to receive. It is a straight forward metric advertisers have grown accustomed to that gives insight into how much (or how little) of the available market a campaign is capturing.
Top Impression % ads the dimension of where ads are appearing on the page. Unlike average position, Top Impression % indicates what percent of ads appear at the top of the page, above the organic search results. A much more powerful metric than average position since it provides insight into the prominence of the ad.
Similarly, Absolute Top Impression % shows the percent of your ads appear at the absolute top of the page, in first position.
Why do they Matter?
The ability to combine how often ads are seen with where ads are appearing on a page provides powerful insights into the tactics necessary to optimize the campaign. An awareness campaign may be willing to sacrifice impression share in order to improve their Absolute Impression % while a lead gen campaign is less focused on where the ad appears in favor of more impression share.
How can MatchCraft help?
To make the most of the new data available from Google, MatchCraft’s adVantage platform and reporting available in the Merchant Center now feature a combination of all three metrics. In the Merchant Center, Average Position has been replaced by Top Impression Rate.
In the adVantage platform, Average Position has been replaced by Top Impression Rate and three additional metrics are available Absolute Top Impression Rate, Search Top Impression Rate and Search Absolute Top Impression Rate.