Your ad campaign’s Average Position shows at which ad exposure to the visitor we show your advertisement. It’s a very important KPI when optimizing.

This guide describes an obsolete metric no longer in use. Please read our Win Rate % Guide instead.

What is the Average Position?

The Average Position of an ad campaign in PlugRush reflects how well you’re doing against your direct competition, meaning all the advertisers that are trying to buy the exact same traffic as you are.

The Average Position of your advertising campaign (and other breakdowns like Sources, browsers, OS, etc.) is shown as a number based on the date range you’ve selected in the campaign stats overview. It tells you at which ad exposure, within a 24 hour time frame, you receive visitors on average.

It’s an extremely important key performance indicator (KPI) to use during the optimization process of any advertising campaign. In this helpful guide, we will present some crucial information about this highly accurate ranking metric that you need to know in order to buy the largest quantity of the most productive web traffic.

It’s a relevant KPI to utilize for both mainstream and adult traffic, both mobile and desktop traffic, and across all the ad formats (i.e. banners, pops, native ads, etc.) we have available.

Achieve the best Position possible!

The ideal Average Position to have is 1.00 and it means your campaign gets all visitors first. This is the Average Position you should strive for, because a fresh visitor is a visitor that is more likely to convert.

The more times a visitor is shown advertisements throughout the day, the less likely they are to sign up for something. This is a general truth and something you should consider when you monitor your campaigns. It’s also extremely important to note that we won’t always get every visitor more than once to monetize them, so you could also be missing out on the absolute amount of web traffic you can buy if your Average Position is higher than 1.00.

If you’re looking to generate conversions with your advertising efforts, you will need to keep a close eye on this metric. And you should increase your campaign’s CPC bid whenever you notice your Average Position dropping below acceptable values.

Perfect, good, okay, and bad Average Positions – Are you ranking well?

While it’s quite subjective which Average Position you should aim to hold, because beating all your competition all the time with an Avg. Pos of 1.00 is not always in the cards, here are some rough guidelines to follow. These are especially useful for campaigns with a goal like generating sales or signups.

Perfect would be an Avg. Pos of 1.00, because it indicates you’re beating your competition to the punch every time a visitor is up for grabs. It’s the best situation to be in.

Good would be if your Average Position is at 3.00 or better. This means the bulk of the web traffic (be it mobile traffic or desktop traffic) you’re getting hasn’t been hit with very many ads yet in the last 24 hours. When you’ve surpassed this point, we definitely recommend that you up your campaign’s bid to help achieve a better Position.

Okay would be an Average Position that comes in around 4.00 or maximally 4.50, because at this point you’re getting into a range of ad exposures that may have already hurt your chances of converting the visitor and you really don’t want that to happen. Once your campaign has exceeded an Avg. Pos of 4.00, we strongly recommend that you give your CPC bid a boost.

Bad territory, in our humble opinion, starts when your campaign’s Average Position is at 5.00 or worse. For banners or native ads, this might still be somewhat acceptable. But if your pop ad campaign is hitting a Position greater than 5.00, you should fight it with a bid increase.

Improving your Average Position is simple and only requires that you raise your bid, so you don’t have to keep dealing with bad ranking campaigns anymore. You can do this manually at the campaign editor level, but if you’re using conversion tracking there is another neat way to do it: You can use Automated Rules to increase bids on specific Sources, countries, browsers, etc. that are doing well for you!

Auto Rules can improve your Position

You can use PlugRush Automated Rules to improve your campaign’s Average Position on specific breakdowns (f.ex. Subsources), because you can have Rules automatically raise the bid by a given percentage when your Average Position is too high. Read this part of the Automated Rules guide for more details.

Thank you for reading!

In case you have more questions, please check our other guides for answers. You can also contact our legendary support team to ask any questions you’re unable to find answers to in the guides.