AdWords Impression Share
AdWords recently rolled out a long-awaited (by us) feature: Impression Share. Now advertisers can see how much demand there is for their keywords without jumping through hoops with the campaign level “Ad Serving” options. Impression Share is available through the reporting interface only at this time.
Impression Share (IS) shows what percentage of searches that you target are actually shown your ads. For instance, you might have an IS of 50% because your budget only covers about half of all searches or because your ad is positioned so low that it rarely shows up on the first page of results. Either way, low impression shares mean missed opportunities.
There are two reasons that your Impression Share can be less than 100%, as noted above. AdWords quantifies both of these, making is possible to adjust your campaigns to increase your exposure. Google can show you “Lost IS (Budget)” to indicate to what extent your daily spending limit is the culprit, “Lost IS (Rank)” tells you when your ads have insufficient rank to be seen for every query. IS + Lost IS (Budget) + Lost IS (Rank) = 100%. In other words, Google provides you with all of the information necessary to increase your IS to 100%.
Example: A particular campaign has an impression share of 40%. This means that there is an opportunity to more than double the exposure of the ads. If the Lost IS (Budget) is also 40%, then doubling the budget should approximately double the number of impressions. Meanwhile the 20% that is lost to rank would require an increase in bids or other changes that effectively raise the ad rank. Note that improving the Lost IS (Rank) by increasing the bid will go through your budget faster, so it will take more than a doubling of budget to get close to 100% IS.
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November 25th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
I’ve just run a month long campaign on selected keywords with a max CPC of $0.50 ( actual was $0.38) and a good budget.There was never a time when the campaign was off because of budget restrictions. I obtained a lot of impressions and good CTR (>4%) but when I ran the campaign report I was shocked to see I’d missed out on 68% of impressions due to “rank”. The average Quality Score was 7, so what do I need to do to get more of the missed impressions?
November 27th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Hi John. Having a low Impression Share due to rank means that your bids aren’t high enough relative to others’ bids for the ads to show all the time. This is not a function of ad quality (7 is good). If you look at the average ad position over that time, it’s probably well above 1. If there only a few competing advertisers, your loss due to rank will likely correspond to an ad position of 5 to 7. However, if there are a lot of advertisers on those keywords, you can lose a lot impressions even with a “good” ad position of 3 to 4.