Starting from the beginning of April 2021, advertisers won’t be able to see the ‘Average Position’ in Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) performance reporting as the metric has been retired in favor of new prominence metrics.
In the last year Jan 2020, Microsoft officially announced that the Average Position metric will be deprecated from performance reports beginning in April 2020, but later it was revised to be deprecated beginning in March 2021. But finally, Microsoft removed the Average Position at the beginning of April 2021.
After Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising is going to retire the ‘Average Position’ from beginning in April. Know the new prominence metrics –https://t.co/iozETUxM5P#Campaign #DigitalMarketing #MarketingStrategy #PPC #Bing #GoogleAds #Microsoft #Marketing #SEO
— SEM Officer (@OfficerSem) January 20, 2020
As the Average Position metric has been removed, you will not be able to use the following features-
- Filters using Avg. position
- Automated rules using Avg. position
- Custom columns using Avg. position
- Custom reports using Avg. position
Back in September 2019, Google officially retired the Average position stating the reason that this metric is not a clear indicator of where ads actually appear in a SERP.
What are the new prominence metrics?
In July 2019, Microsoft announced the release of new prominence metrics to provide clearer insight on where ads appear on search result pages and help better optimization of the performance.
- Top impression share
- Top impression share lost to rank
- Top impression share lost to budget
- Absolute top impression share
- Absolute top impression share lost to rank
- Absolute top impression share lost to budget
Is there any way to get the Avg. position data?
If you have a saved custom report created before April 2021 and that has the average position metric selected in columns setting. You can still change the date range of that saved report and can download it. This will let you show the Avg. position data for the selected date range.
Do not update or create similar report as you will not able to add the Avg. position column after this update.
