Having been inspired by the fantastic paid search posts which I’ve been seeing on here recently, I decided to chime in with one of my own – hopefully you’ll find this useful :)

What is impression share?

You can calculate your impression share by dividing the total number of search queries relevant to your campaign by the total number of times your ads appear. For example, let’s imagine that there are 100 searches for blue widgets per day, and your ad shows 80 times – you would therefore have an 80% impression share. 

What affects your impression share?

Two factors – daily budget and rank.Your daily budget is set at a campaign level to place a limit on your daily spend. If your daily budget is too low then you will miss out on impressions and therefore potentially valuable clicks and conversions.  Rank refers to the average position which your ads appear. This is based on a combination of quality score and the bids which you have set on your keywords. Again, if your ads are ranked too low, they will not appear. 

So, how can you find out how much coverage you are getting for your spend?

Google does have the functionality to let you run reports on this – but they don’t exactly shout about it. Here’s what you need to do: 

1. Click on the ‘Reports’ tab
2. Click on ‘Create Report’
3. Select ‘Campaign Performance’
4. Within ‘Settings’:
   
   • select an appropriate unit of time (it automatically defaults to summary but you can choose to drill down to hourly if you so desire – this is particularly useful if you want to illustrate that by 3pm your campaign has run out of money)
   • select your date range
   • select to view all campaigns or to select from a list
5. Within ‘Advanced Settings’:
   
   • Click on ‘Add or Remove Columns’
   • Make sure you have selected – Impression Share (IS), Lost IS (Rank), and Lost IS (Budget)
   • Click on any other stats which you would also like to see
6. Click ‘Create Report’ 
   

So now you’ve got your report – what does it mean? 

Campaign        Impressions    Clicks    IS    Lost IS (Rank)    Lost IS (Budget)

Blue Widgets    773                    90        42%    6%                    52% 

In the above example we have 42% impression share – we are losing out of 6% of available impressions due to our rank, and a further 52% due to our daily budget. 

Now, assuming that this is a profitable campaign we can increase our daily budget to increase impression share which in turn should increase the number of conversions we receive. 

However, if you are losing impression share as a result of your rank, there’s a bit more work to do. You might consider optimising your campaign to improve your quality score which may improve your rank without you having to increase your bids, or if your campaign is already fairly well optimised, you might consider increasing your bids for a short time to see if you can make it profitable for you to appear higher in the results.

But bear in mind it’s all about ROI. There’s very little point in having an impression share of 90% if the campaign is unprofitable.