Good morning search marketers, are you ready to say arrivederci to average position?
OK, it's not going anywhere quite yet, but Google announced it will retire average position reporting in Google Ads later this year. What will post-average position life be like? Start preparing for this shift now and you should end up better informed. Frederick Vallaeys says it is time to start rethinking bidding strategies and position metrics in his latest column.
In more goodbyes, Google Search Console users will lose the property sets feature at the end of March. Not a big surprise – we first reported this news a couple of months ago. You can download data for now. Google says its working on an alternative solution, but no word yet what that is.
Call-only ads in Google are getting the "expanded" treatment with more text. As part of this announcement, Google said the business name will move down to the description line. That small shift could have an outsized performance impact for some advertisers.
The Facebook ads algorithm is its own animal. Traditional search campaign structures just won't work, Michelle Morgan told the crowd at SMX West. To truly leverage the Facebook ads algorithm, first thing you need to do is get your campaign objective right. Everything follows from that critical choice.
Lots more below, including how you can help inform the upcoming refresh of The Periodic Table of SEO Factors.
Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief