We’re continuing our series on KPI monitoring & diagnosis with an in-depth look into why you lose impression share due to budget. This is referred to as Lost IS (budget) in Google Ads.
Impression share loss due to budget essentially means you don’t have a high enough budget to show your ads all the time.
While this is a simple definition, it’s possible for you not to make any budget changes and see your impression share loss budget increase or decrease significantly compared to a different timeframe.
Several factors can affect your lost IS by budget, including:
- Seasonality
- Volume changes
- Targeting changes
- CPC changes
- Quality score
- Budget changes
It’s important to keep on top of this metric as it directly affects search impression share and can help us understand changes to our impressions. This is especially useful when the search volume increases at a higher rate than our impressions. For instance, in this account, the search volume went up 130%, but our impressions only went up 16%. Why was this? The account lost a lot of impressions due to budget.
By understanding how lost impression share by budget works, we can easily monitor our account and changing search behaviors, so that we’re always funding our most profitable campaigns.
Seasonality & changes to search volume
If you don’t make any changes to your account and still lose impression share due to budget, it’s generally due to changes in search volume.
The most common reason for search volume fluctuations is seasonality. Many accounts have periods where there is more or less search volume.
However, search volume changes can arise from many sources: TV commercials, social mentions, new ad campaigns, journalists, etc.
When a change is predicted (seasonality, TV commercials, etc.), it’s best to raise your budgets ahead of time to capture the additional volume. When it isn’t predicted, such as randomly being mentioned by a celebrity, having a blog post go viral, and so on, then automatic monitoring can help you to react quickly.
Targeting changes
If you make targeting changes that increase or decrease your impressions, this directly affects your lost impression share due to budget. If you lower the number of auctions you enter by adding negative keywords or pausing keywords, then your loss impression share by budget should decrease since you have fewer opportunities to spend money and gather clicks.
If you add new targeting options, such as DSAs, new keywords, or removing negative keywords, then your lost IS due to budget will generally increase since you now have new opportunities to spend.
As you make significant changes to your targeting options, you’ll want to revisit your budgets to see if you need to increase, decrease or move budget to another campaign.
CPC changes
If your CPC goes up or down a lot, this often affects your lost IS due to budget. If your CPCs go down, then each click costs less, which means you can show more often before your budget runs out.
If your CPCs go up, then you’ll spend your budget faster, run out of budget quicker, and see an increase in lost IS due to budget.
For campaigns with manual CPC bidding, it’s easy to know when your CPCs change to coordinate changes to your budget.
When you’re using automated bidding, you might not realize your CPCs have changed dramatically and can be caught off guard. When using automated bidding, we’re often focused on target CPA or target ROAS. However, you do want to monitor your impression share budget loss. If the system is working well, you generally want to raise your budgets (or lower your targets, which we’ll get to later in this article).
CPCs can also change quickly when a new competitor enters the market, or when current competitors change their bidding. This Google Looker Studio report can help you monitor competitors.
Quality score changes
Changes to your quality score can be tricky to evaluate from an impression share loss standpoint.
If your quality score increases, number of auctions you can compete in will also go up. This means you’ll often see your impression share loss switch from a rank loss (meaning you were too low on a page to be displayed) to a budget loss.
If you are often in the top positions and your quality scores increase, then you might see a decline in average CPC, which means you can get more clicks for the same budget, and your loss impression share budget will decrease.
If you see your quality scores decrease, then you might see a loss in impression share due to rank as your ads ranked too low to be displayed. You might also see an increase in CPC, which means you’ll run out of budget sooner since you are paying more per click.
Usually, when quality scores changes, you’ll notice the effects on impression share loss due to rank because of a CPC change and not directly as a result of a quality score change. However, being able to track quality score changes is always useful.
Budget changes
Obviously, if you change your budget, you can expect your budget share loss number to change. What you want to do first is to find the opportunities to increase your budget and still get conversions at an acceptable CPA. You can see much more about this concept here: What happens when you change your PPC budget?
What you should do when your lost IS due to budget changes
When you see a change to impression share loss due to budget, there are a few things you can do. The tricky part here is that some companies have an absolute monthly or quarterly budget. Therefore, you can’t spend over an amount in a given timeframe. In these cases, you can often move budget from one place to another place, but you can’t just raise them. Other companies have CPA or ROAS targets, and as long as you are within the targets, you can increase the budget as needed.
If you can raise budgets and you’re within your CPA or ROAS targets, you should have very little IS loss due to budget. You should be changing budgets to capture as much demand as you can.
If you are budget-constrained, then you want to make the most efficient use of your budget as possible. For example, in this account (click image to zoom in) most of the campaigns are underspending. One campaign has a 24% lost impression share (budget) and has a lower cost per conversion than some other campaigns. Therefore, if we’re budget-constrained, we can move budget from underspending campaigns to that campaign to get more conversions.
If lost impression share increases and your CPA or ROAS targets are being met, then talk to whoever sets budgets to see if you can get a boost. If not, then look at your least profitable campaigns and move budget over.
The other option is to lower your bids. For example, if you have a $1 CPC and $100 daily budget, you will get 100 clicks per day. If you lower your bid to $0.75, then you can get 133 clicks per day. There comes a point where lowering your bid will hurt you as the ad will no longer be visible, and you might see an increase in loss impression share due to rank. If you are budget-constrained, your challenge is to find the balance between a bid that gets you the most clicks for your converting keywords and overbidding.
Wrap-up
Impression share loss due to budget occurs when your budget is too low to gather all the possible clicks. That’s fine for experimental campaigns, awareness campaigns, and some display campaigns (but not remarketing), as you’re first trying to generate awareness (and there’s so much inventory out there, that most people can’t afford to always show).
What you don’t want is to lose impression share due to budget in your most profitable campaigns. These campaigns should have plenty of budget to capture demand. If they don’t and you can’t raise the budget, then remove the least profitable targeting in those campaigns or lower your bids.
The other thing to watch for is when search volume shifts and suddenly you are losing traffic in these profitable campaigns due to seasonality or just changes to search behavior. If you’re monitoring your impression share and can see when the shift is occurring, then you can quickly manipulate your budgets to capture the profitable demand.
Impression share is a great metric to examine how often you’re showing and to ensure your most profitable campaigns are as visible as possible. The reasons we lose impression share are either budget or rank. In our next article, we will dig into impression share loss due to rank and see how we can address when loss due to rank shifts over time.
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