Understanding Search Impression Share

searchimpressionshare

Google defines “Impression share is a metric that represents the percentage of times that your ads are shown out of the total available impressions for which your ads were eligible to appear. Eligibility is based on your current ads’ targeting, match types, and bids.”

SO what does this really mean?

In a nutshell, if there were 100 searches for the term you are searching for in broad, phrase or exact match, and your ad showed up 80 out of the 100 times, your impression share is 80%. If you ran out of budget that day, you most likely missed those last 20 impressions.

Lets simply this a bit more – Lets assume the online advertising space as a large delicious extra topping pizza pie. You, along with your competitors are each trying to grab the biggest slice of that pie. By tracking your impression share metrics, you’re keeping tabs on the size of your slice compared to the whole. The farther your reach to grab more of these slices the more you’re able to keep for yourself. So, now lets get into how do you actually grab a lot more slices.

Keyword Budget

If you bid low for your keywords, you risk that your ads will not appear on the first page, which may lead to missed opportunities for impressions, clicks, and even conversions. Ensuring that your bids are high enough that your ads are appearing in a competitive position will greatly improve your chances of capturing impressions and clicks, and generating traffic to your site.

As a general rule of thumb, Google will stop displaying your ads for the day once your daily budget is exhausted. If your campaigns have a low daily budget, and that budget limit is reached early in the day, your ads will not be shown later in the day.

Match type

Every ad on the network is populated by a keyword or a query that’s typed in a search bar. These keywords are associated with corresponding Ads that then display them to the user. They are several different match types and each match type usually has a different bid associated with it.

E.g. for a single search query “buy new tires”, this will trigger an impression for “new tires” and “buy new tires” and +tires +new and +buy +new +tires (plus others). Only one of these three keywords will get the impression, but broad match impression share calculation applies the impression to all three keywords.

The above would give a 33% impression share, even if you appeared on 100% of all instances of that search.

An exact match example can be a query with a brand, for example: [Goodyear tires], this will trigger ads with matching the brand Goodyear tires. This will give a 100% impression share since your brand Goodyear tires matched exact to the query.

Impression share can really give you an indication on how you can act on an under-performing set of keywords. Whether it is increasing your daily bids or budget, improving the quality of your ad copy and keywords, you’ll have plenty of options for improvement before considering pausing a keyword.

Author: Hassan Abbas

Marketing Professional