Average Position Calculation Bug in Account Performance Report

[AdWordsApiUser]

If an account has shopping campaigns (they are assigned average position of 0), when I pull the account performance report, the average position is often less than 1.

What seems to be happening is that when calculating the avg position, the system does a weighted average over position and impressions, but it is also including shopping campaigns' 0 avg. position. this causes wrong avg. position to be reported.

To validate my theory, I tried the same thing in the ad words interface, and viola - wrong Average Position at the account level in the AdWords UI! (Avg. Position is less than Avg. Pos on Search or Display). I have more examples where avg. position actually drops below 1 due to this reason.

Probably the correct way to calculate the average is to leave out campaigns that have an average position of 0 when calculating the weighted average. Guidance from the AdWords team on how to read the Average Position stat would be helpful. An email informing me of a bug bounty award would be nice too :)

Cheers,

MG

[Josh Radcliff (AdWords API Team)]

Hi MG,

Thanks for pointing this out. Could you send your customer ID only to me by clicking Reply privately to author? I'd like to use your example when sending this issue to the reporting team.

As a workaround, you could use the CAMPAIGN_PERFORMANCE_REPORT to get campaign-level results instead.

Cheers,

Josh, AdWords API Team

[AdWordsApiUser]

Hi Josh,

Just sent you the details in a private message.

Have a great day!

MG

[Zweitze]

It is my understanding that shopping campaigns do not have average positions for ads (or products). My explanation is that end users can sort the search results themselves on various criteria like price, product name, rating etc. so position has become meaningless.
As a result of that observation, it makes no sense to include results of shopping campaigns in the total results.

I use the following workaround: do not request the account report, but a campaign report, then calculate the account average yourself.

Still a nice catch of an error in the AdWords UI!

[Josh Radcliff (AdWords API Team)]

Hi,

I've raised this issue with the reporting team and included your example. I'll post back here once I hear back from them.

Thanks,

Josh, AdWords API Team