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Making your performance reporting clearer and more reliable

Updated 6 November 2020.

Performance reporting is a key element in enabling continuous optimisation of your campaigns, since you need to understand where your ads are appearing on search result pages in order to know how to take action accordingly. Back in July, we announced the release of prominence metrics to provide this clearer insight for you. Now, we’re announcing an additional update to ensure your performance reporting is even more reliable: the removal of average position.
 
Due to all your feedback and our insights into the ever-changing industry standards in digital advertising, we’ve determined that prominence metrics give a much clearer view of your prominence on the page than average position does. In an effort to limit confusion and allow you to focus on just the key metrics that matter to you most, average position will be deprecated from performance reports beginning in March 2021 (revised).

Product view of the average position column, which will be deprecated from reports.
The Avg. pos. column (shown right) will be deprecated from performance reports.
 
As a reminder, the new prominence metrics that can give you a clearer insight into your performance are:
 
  • 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

We hope these metrics can help you diagnose fluctuations in ad performance, or signal if it’s time to take action such as making changes to your bids, providing overall help so you can maximise your returns with Microsoft Advertising. 

Product view of prominence metrics columns in report.
Columns showing new prominence metrics.

Adding these new metrics and removing some others, like impression share lost to bid, relevance, and expected CTR, brings this reporting closer to parity with Google Ads.

Let us know your thoughts

For any questions or feedback regarding reporting, we encourage you to reach out to your Microsoft Advertising account manager or contact Support. You can also ping us on Twitter, or suggest a feature on the Microsoft Advertising Feature Suggestion Forum.