The day after Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, shares some insights on the average position metric, emphasizing that conversion rates don’t vary much with the position, they decide to call it quits on the AdWords Position Preference feature.

Set aside the fact that the position preference feature was confusing and unlikely to be missed considering you can now run automated rules to keep your average position in check, here is the real reason AdWords is doing away with position preference:

setting a position preference can sharply reduce the number of impressions and clicks you receive for that keyword. Targeting just one or two positions means your ad will not show at times when it otherwise might have. ~ What is position preference?

At the end of the day, Google wants your ads running whenever possible. Why would they keep position preference around when they can get you to jack up your bids using automated rules in order to achieve a desired position without sacrificing impressions and clicks?

Duh! Winning!

If you have ever wondered what all of the “other unique” queries are after running a search query report from AdWords and didn’t have the time or know-how to setup custom analytics filters, today is your day. From within the AdWords report center, you now have the option to run an “advanced” search query report. Although you still get a handful of “other uniques”, there certainly aren’t as many and in return you get a plethora of long tail keyword goodness.

Armed with this new knowledge, you can maximize your keyword coverage by expanding your existing keyword sets and improve your ad targeting (CTR) by implementing negative keywords!

UPDATE: This feature may not be available to the general public yet as I have only seen it in action within a couple of AdWords accounts.