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Impression Share defined is the number of impressions received divided by the estimated number of impressions you’re eligible to receive. This definition alone doesn’t really help us though. We need to know how to use Impression Share, or lack thereof, to help better understand what we can do to increase our overall impression share.
Types of Impression Share include:
- Search impression share: The impressions you’ve received on the Search Network divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.
- Display impression share: The impressions you’ve received on the Display Network
divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. - Search Lost IS (budget): The percentage of time that your ads weren’t shown on the
Search Network due to insufficient budget. This data is available at the campaign
level only - Display Lost IS (budget): The percentage of time that your ads weren’t shown on the
Display Network due to insufficient budget. This data is available at the campaign
level only. - Search Lost IS (rank): The percentage of time that your ads weren’t shown on the examined.
- Display Lost IS (rank): The percentage of time that your ads weren’t shown on the
Display Network due to poor Ad Rank. Note: Lost IS (rank) won’t be shown on your Ad
groups tab if you ran out of budget at any point during the date range being
examined. - Search Exact match IS: The impressions you’ve received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive on the Search Network for search terms that matched your keywords exactly (or were close variants of your keyword).
By looking at your impression share you’ll know how many times your ad has shown, or rather hasn’t shown, by looking at the percentage given. The next step is to look into where you have lost impression share, either due to rank or by budget. If you are loosing impression share due to budget, simply increase your budget. However, if you are loosing impression share due to rank there are a number of things that you can do to increase your impression share.
Take a look into your Quality Scores. If you have low Quality Scores this can lead to a low Ad Rank. Increasing Quality Scores is a matter of increasing overall relevancy. Remember that ad creations, and landing pages need to be relevant to keywords in their Ad Groups. This generally where you’ll find a problem. However, if your Quality Scores are good you will want to take a look into your bids next as they may be low.
If you see that some of your keywords aren’t showing in a higher position this could be the issue as well, as they may not be able to be seen as much as others due to your cost per click. If this is the issue simply increase your bids until you are being seen in a higher ad position. These are just some initial things you can do to increase your overall impression share.
Written By: Ed Cehi – PPC
