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! On Friday, April 17, 2015 at 8:03:15 PM UTC+2, AdWordsApiUser wrote: > > 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. > > > <https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q4eW5h8AATY/VTFKAyIZ0QI/AAAAAAAAKAA/JbLiCriEVlg/s1600/Capture.PNG> > > > 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 > > > > > > -- -- =~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~ Also find us on our blog and Google+: https://googleadsdeveloper.blogspot.com/ https://plus.google.com/+GoogleAdsDevelopers/posts =~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AdWords API Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to adwords-api@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to adwords-api+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/adwords-api?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AdWords API Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to adwords-api+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/adwords-api. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/adwords-api/3b530f79-e856-4abb-a23b-ceadea24d340%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
