Impression share analysis is a diagnostic tool that helps you determine how to increase conversions for your current keywords. Let’s look at how to analyze this data to get more from your account.
Impression share (IS) is the percentage of times your ad was displayed compared to how often it was eligible to be displayed. Essentially, it’s your share of voice metric. You can see this data at the campaign, ad group, or keyword level.
There are also two impression share loss metrics, which explain why you missed out on impressions:
Lost IS (budget): How often the keyword didn’t display an ad, because your budget was too low.
Lost IS (rank): How often the keyword didn’t display an ad, because your ad rank was too low.
You can use impression share loss data and other analyses to determine how to increase your conversions or revenue.
The easiest way to capture impressions lost due to low budgets is to spend more. The metric also helps you assess the impact of raising your campaign budget.
Raising your budget isn’t always possible though, so let’s look at other ways to increase conversions:
Start your analysis by examining the number of campaigns that lost IS due to budget constraints. Then, check if some campaigns have cheaper conversions than others.
For instance, campaign 2 is losing 22% of its impressions due to budget. It also has the lowest cost per conversion of every campaign in the list. Moving some budget over from another campaign would gain more conversions without spending more. (Budget management tools can automate this type of budget manipulation.)
Another approach is to use your budget more efficiently. Do you have keywords with higher CPAs than the average for your account or keywords that aren’t converting? Pausing those keywords will allow your better-performing keywords to receive more impressions. This means you’ll end up with more conversions for the same budget.
Lastly, you can try lowering your manual CPC or CPA bids or increasing your target ROAS amounts. For instance, if you’re paying $20 per conversion and can’t afford to have your ads shown all day long, what happens if you lower your target CPA to $18? Will you get more conversions for the same budget? Often, the answer is yes.
This is a balancing act. As you lower bids, you’ll probably see an increase in impression share loss due to rank. If you lower your bids too much, your ads may only show rarely, and you’ll receive fewer conversions.
Beyond budget issues, the second reason our ads do not receive impressions is a low ad rank.
Every time there’s an auction, Google calculates the ad rank for all eligible advertisers. The ads are then ordered from highest to lowest ad rank on the search results page. (This process has some nuances, but we’ll use a simplified version for this article). If your ad rank is too low for your ad to be displayed, you lose that impression due to a low ad rank.
Ad rank is a combination of three factors:
The first step is to ensure we have a good variety of ad assets (formerly called ad extensions). Look at your assets to ensure you’re using:
You may choose to have more, such as phone, location, or price, as appropriate. If you have fewer than 4-5 different assets, adding more assets can make a small difference in your ad rank. We also recommend checking your assets display in all your search campaigns. You can learn more about auditing your ad assets here.
Next, we want to look at our quality scores, which play a significant role in determining our ad rank.
If you see lots of low quality scores, you can work to increase them. The easiest ways to check if particular quality score sub-factors can be improved are to use a pivot table (the 5-minute mark of this video will give you a starting point) or software (the above screenshot is from Adalysis).
You may also find The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads Quality Score useful. This article and associated videos will show you how to improve your Quality Scores.
Lastly, if your ad assets and quality scores are in good shape, raising bids is the only way to capture these impressions.
Raising bids generally increases your CPA or lowers your ROAS, so it’s usually the last step we want to take. If you’re using automated bidding, raising your bid is the same as raising your target CPA or lowering your Target ROAS.
Impression share and the associated loss metrics can help you determine how to increase your conversions or revenue. By monitoring it daily (or using automated KPI monitoring), you can spot new trends, such as this account suddenly losing impressions due to its too-low budget (screenshot from Adalysis).
It’s rare to maintain above 90% impression share for non-branded terms. Too many factors go into ad rank and budget for someone to show all the time. For instance, if Google decides to show no ads, then your ad rank is too low to show, and you lose an impression. If your ad is often in position 2, and Google only shows one ad on a page, you still lose the impression due to ad rank since your ad’s position was below the number of ad slots displayed.
In general, above 80% is excellent for non-brand keywords, and above 90% (95% for large brands) are good numbers to strive for when managing your brand keywords. However, many well managed accounts will have a 10%-30% impression share. Due to budget limitations and target CPAs, they won’t get more impressions. If the account provides you with the returns you’re looking for, that’s fine. Not everyone needs to have amazingly high impression shares.
When you want more conversions and can’t raise your budget or bids, use your impression share loss data to find new ways to increase your account’s performance.
