Impression Share for Better Understanding of Your Campaigns

Google Ads is indispensable for digital marketers in the internet age. It’s notably functional to deliver your product or service to the masses. But in all honesty: optimizing a Google Ads campaign sometimes can be challenging. Impression Share metrics can help you if you need answers to questions like “are my keywords good enough,” “is my budget sufficient for my goals,” “what is my campaign’s potential.”

 

What is Impression Share?

With the simplest explanation, Impression Share is a metric that compares the total impressions your ad gets with the eligible ones your ad can get. See the formula below.

 

impression share = impressions/total eligible impressions

It’s simple. Isn’t it? This simple formula can be key to much more successful ad campaigns. Impression share allows you to know how effective your ad is. You can improve your ad, tweak your strategy according to your score. Google estimates an impression share score using some features of your ad and some features of the market you compete.

 

While Google estimates the eligible impressions, it considers targeting settings, approval statuses, and ad quality.

 

How does It work?

Google uses internal data such as the quality of your ad and your competitor’s ad within the same ad auctions to estimate Impression Share by collecting data from ad auctions throughout the day. These include all the auctions when your ad appears, also, all other auctions when your ad is competitive enough to appear. It may, for instance, involve auctions that your ad could appear at twilight. So you may want to adjust your bids a little higher at that time of day.

 

It’s to your advantage to remember that Impression Share is an estimate of how competitive your ad was during an auction. Small changes in the Impression Share over time may not always mean that an action is required. Your ad’s competitiveness depends on several circumstances, such as changes to your bids, your ad’s Quality Score, or other factors in Google’s ad systems.

 

Impression Share Types

Some sub-metrics provide you with valuable insights. You can decide which actions to take depending on the impression share type to improve your ad campaigns.

 

Display Impression Share

Display Impression Share is the rate of the total impressions on Google’s Display Network, divided by the total for which your ad was eligible.

 

You may want to adjust your budget or placements of your ad to optimize your Display Impression Share, depending on your marketing goals.

 

Display Lost Impression Share (Budget)

Display Lost Impression Share (Budget) is a budget-bound metric. Probably the name gave it away, but thanks for letting us explain, just in case. It’s the percentage of your ads that lost impression on the Display Network because your budget was insufficient.

 

Display Lost Impression Share (Rank)

Display Lost Impression Share (Rank) is the percentage of lost impressions of your ads on the Display Network due to low Ad Rank. The loss may depend on several reasons like the ad’s Quality Score, CTR, bid amount, or even the time of the auctions. You might have to dig deeper to understand why your ranking is low and act accordingly.

 

Search Impression Share

Search Impression Share is the rate of the total number of impressions you have on the Search Network, divided by the total number you were eligible for.

 

This metric is also primarily about your budget. So the method to get more impressions is either increasing your budget or focusing on your Quality Score, conversion rate, bid, or target of your ad.

 

Search Lost Impression Share (Budget)

This metric displays the percentage of the lost impressions on the Search Network due to insufficient budget. Guessed the solution? It’s pretty similar to Display Lost Impression Share (Budget) but for the Search Network. So you should look at your budget and adjust it in line with your goals.

 

Search Lost Impression Share (Rank)

Search Lost Impression Share (Rank) metric shows the percentage of the impressions your ad lost on the Search Network because you had a low Ad Ranks. Similar to Display Lost Impression Share (Rank) you should try to increase your ad’s rating by improving

 

Search Exact Match Impression Share

Search Exact Match Impression Share displays how much of its potential your ad reached as a percentage. It’s the rate of impressions your ad had out of all the possible ones on the Search Network for search terms that exactly matched your keywords —or were close variants of your keyword.

 

How Can You Access Your Data?

To get your Impression Share data, follow these steps:

 

1. Open the Adwords Dashboard 
2. Click on the Campaigns tab
3. Click on the Columns on the Campaigns tab
4. Click on the Modify Columns button below the Columns.
5. Choose Competitive Metrics within options
6. Select the type of Impression Share you want to know

• • Display IS
  • Display Lost IS (Budget)
  • Display Lost IS (Rank)
  • Search IS
  • Search Lost IS (budget)
  • Search Lost IS (Rank)
  • Search Exact Match IS)

7. Save those metrics to your statistics table
8. If you want to download the data, click the Download button on the toolbar. 

 

It’s good to check this data regularly. Due to the factors that indicate impression share is fluxional, Impression Share can change with time. 

 

How Can You Improve?

• If your keyword performance is good, but your Impression Share (Rank) is low, there could be problems with your landing page or copy or both. You may need to work over these.
• If your campaign’s overall performance is good, but your Impression Share is low, it’s possibly due to insufficient budget. Increasing your budget can improve your Impression Share.
• For Search Impression Share, you need to know which of your keywords are working, which are not. Exact Match Impression Share metric can help you understand the performance of your keywords better.
• Improving your Quality Score helps you improve your Ad Rank. Higher Ad Rank means better Impression Share.
• Region settings influence the Impression Share. Showing your ad to disinterested people is a waste. Good location targeting can improve Impression Share.

 

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