By Elyse Jarvis, Account Coordinator
Google announces it will no longer offer the Position Preference feature for its popular PPC advertising platform, AdWords.
Google announced this month that it will be discontinuing its Position Preference feature in AdWords. The search giant will replace Position Preference with an Automated Rules function that allows for automatic changes to a keyword’s bid, budget or status based on user specifications.
Position Preference has allowed users to designate desired placement for keywords and limits ads from appearing when bids were not high enough to secure the user’s preferred placement. For instance, if position one was selected as the intended placement, ads matching a user search query would only appear if the bid for the keyword was high enough to place it in position one.
While this capability was helpful for bid management, Google explained on its blog that it is important to understand that there are two processes effecting positioning, and that understanding these features is key to using positioning functions as success measurements for Google ads.
According to Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian on Google’s blog, the term page position refers to an ad’s location on the search results page. An ad’s auction position is its position in the auction for top positioning for a search query—which is essentially based on the bid for the keyword and the quality score. The average position AdWords reports is based on the auction position.
It is vital to understand the difference between the two. Although bidding high enough and maintaining a quality score high enough to secure auction position one will always mean your ad is the first shown on a search results page, the ad can be displayed in two different page positions on the page. The first position (shown in the top photo below) is the first ad above search results. The ad can also appear as the first ad on the right-hand side of results (shown in the lower photo). Ads appearing above search results typically encourage more user interaction.
Varian notes that the difference between the terms can produce “some seemingly paradoxical outcomes.” For example, increasing a bid can improve the page position but not the auction position when competition for the term is low. Even if AdWords reports that an ad’s average position is number one, if there are a limited number of other ads appearing for the search query, the ad might be appearing in page position one on the right-hand side. To raise your page position to the location above search results, the bid needs to be increased, even if the position in the auction remains one.
So does it matter to us that Google is doing away with Position Preference? Not really. As Varian explains, positioning is more of a “distribution of outcomes.” The way Google reports the Average Position is the result of so many variables that it is difficult to fully measure and results are always unpredictable.
