We knew it was coming. Now we know when. Google announced Monday that it will begin sunsetting the average position metric the week of September 30.

Why we should care

Google said in February that average position would be phasing out earlier this year. Now, we have about 6 weeks to fully absorb the repercussions of the change and implement updates to any reporting, rules or scripts that use average position.

In lieu of average position, Google says advertisers should transition to using the the position metrics — search top impression rate and search absolute top impression rate — introduced last year. These indicate the percentage of impressions and impression share your ads received in the absolute top (the first ad at the very top of the page) and top of page (above the organic results) ad slots.

More on the news

The following functions will be disabled beginning the week of September 30: Rules using average position, Custom columns using average position, Saved reports that filter on average position, Saved filters with average position.

Average position will be removed from any saved column sets, saved reports that use the average position column, but don’t filter on it and scorecards that use average position in dashboards.

Also note the {adposition} ValueTrack parameter will start returning an empty string the week of September 30.

Related reading: Frederick Vallaeys’ on rethinking bidding strategies and position metrics without average position.