 |
Use Your Impression Share Report To Increase Clicks and ConversionsPosted by Joe on October 7, 2008 in Google AdWords, Reporting / Conversion Tracking |
What do you do when you feel like you’ve hit the traffic ceiling for your campaigns? There are no budgets restricting your ad distribution but you still feel like you aren’t generating the amount of traffic you think you’re capable of. The next step you can take is to focus on your campaigns’ impression share. Today, I would like to define Impression Share within Google AdWords, what it means to you, and how you can improve this aspect of your campaign.
Impression share is a metric that represents the percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total number of page impressions in the market you were targeting. Basically, this report measures how many impressions you received compared to the total number of impressions for your keywords. Keep in mind, you can measure impression share only on the search network.
First things first: how do you find out what your impression share is? Within the Reports tab of AdWords you can add impression share columns to your campaign report. You can acquire impression share information only with a campaign level report (no ad groups, etc.). Here is a quick screen shot:
In this report, you can see that I checked these boxes that regard to impression share: Impression Share (IS), Lost IS (Rank), Lost IS (Budget), Exact Match IS. What does each term mean?
Impressions Share (IS): As mentioned above, this will give you the impression share for each campaign.
Lost IS (Rank): This column reflects a portion of the total page impressions you were eligible for that were lost due to budget or rank reasons.
Lost IS (Budget): This column reflects the impression share you are losing due to an insufficient budget.
Between these three columns, this is your impression share equation: Your impression share + Lost IS (Budget) + Lost IS (Rank) = 100%.
Exact Match IS: This column reports the impression share of your campaigns as if your keywords were set to Exact Match. Since keyword match type can affect your impression share, Impression Share Exact Match can help you determine your impression share for just the specific keywords you are targeting without requiring you to make adjustments to your campaigns.
In regards to these reports, keep mind that Google AdWords does not report lost impression share measures below 10% because the values may not be meaningful based on the volume of data available. These values are expressed as ‘N/A’ in the columns.
Here is how my impression share report looks!
What is this report telling me?
My overall impression share for this campaign is low. However, my Exact Match impression share is very high at 85%. This is good news because it means that I am showing on all the exact variations.
Next, I’ll look at the impression share lost to budget and rank. My impression share loss due to budget is 0%, which means my budget is high enough to show at all times. However, my impression due to rank is 62%. This is most likely the reason why the overall impression share is low.
My average rank of 3 is high, however, the ads are not showing enough on all the expansions and other variations (i.e. broad match & phrase match). In order to increase the overall impression share and decrease the percentage due to rank, I will run a search query report. If I find relevant variations in the report, I will add these to my keyword list as exact match keywords. Doing so will allow me to show on those expansions and should improve my impression share percentage.
So, what is a good percentage for impression share? A 100% impression share is an unrealistic number. Since impression share is the percentage your ad shows versus the total number of possibilities, it is not not very likely an ad will show on all expansions and variations all the time. Therefore, you should aim to have as high a number of impression share as possible. I have asked around and I think if you’re impression share is between 65-75%, you’re doing pretty good.
Your impression share report will certainly look different from mine but here are some rules of thumb to follow when interpreting your data:
- If your Impression Share (IS) is low, then something is holding you back. Look at your Exact Match IS and if this is high, then your other keyword variations are not displaying to their full potential.
- If your Lost IS (Rank) is high, then you need to increase bids as you are not ranking high enough.
- If your Lost IS (Budget) is high, then you need to increase your budget as your ads are not displaying at all times.
If you need more traffic/clicks/conversions for your campaign, you may not have to look far. In fact, they may be right under your nose. You just have to look and the impression share report can help!
- Impression Share, Takin’ it to the Streets
- PPC News Roundup For 10/23/2009
- Placement Performance Reporting
- 2 Major Reasons Why You Should Run a Search Query Report Today!
- Top 5 PPC Developments That Made News in 2007
October 8th, 2008 at 9:02 am
I’m puzzled by some of the impression share data. For example we have one campaign with IS of just 26%, Exact IS of 95% and averag position of 1.9. Lost IS budget is 0%. Lost IS Rank is 74%. But how can an add with position 1.9 lose out due to rank 74% of the time? Does that mean the times it does not show the rank would have been much lower?
October 8th, 2008 at 9:24 am
HI Joe,
Thx for this great post.
Starting from it would you agree to dig in deeper and talk about the influence of DayParting on this report plz ?
ie.: if my campaign set up includes a day parting from 8 am to 9 pm
Then how accurate this report would be ?
My understanding is this report is not accurate with the day parting but, is it ?
October 8th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Hello Phil:
That’s a good question. Sounds like your budget isn’t holding you back. And it sounds like your Exact Match IS is great at 95%. It must be your other match types that aren’t ranking well and that is bringing down your overall IS. You may want to check your broad & phrase match keywords.
Hello Google-Free:
If you are using day-parting to turn your ads off completely, then the IS percentage should be correct. I would think Google measures that total number of impressions for when your ads are active. So, if your ads are turned off at 9pm until 8am, then you are not generating impressions. I hope that makes sense!