It happened – Average Position is gone. Caput. Outta here. It was, at its best, a vanity metric and not a reliable indicator of how well your ads were positioned. On a small scale, you could have seventy ads in position one and thirty ads in position five for an Average Position of 2.2. An Average Position of 2.2 would have many believe their ads were at the top more than 70% of the time.

Now I understand positioning is very important. Google understands, too, otherwise it wouldn’t have provided us with Top Impression Share and Absolute Top Impression Share as an improvement over Average Position.

Still, these new metrics simply lend themselves to helping us see the bigger picture of our campaigns’ overall health. Some PPC managers, including myself, have long been obsessing over where ads are positioned rather than doubling down on the entire ecosystem of a campaign. It is time we place more importance on how all campaign metrics are intertwined and work together to improve ROI. As PPC managers, we don’t have to rely on a single metric to make decisions – nor should we want to.

– Anna Blanken is a PPC specialist at Farah & Farah law firm

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Speed report APIs. Google released new speed reports in Search Console, but the company has no ETA for when APIs might be released for them, said John Mueller of Google.

Google parser. Did you know the Google parser on production uses a different port from the one used in Search Console? That is what Gary Illyes from Google said.

Dwell time. Martin Splitt from Google said, “we’re not using such metrics” such as dwell time or time-on-page when it comes to ranking.

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