Impression share is one of those metrics that can tell you a lot about your online market share, and how effectively you’re targeting them. Simply put, impression share is the number of impressions received divided by the total number of impressions that a campaign was eligible for.
Impressions share, and the number of impressions that you show up for, directly link to your keywords. The numbers are based off of the keywords in your account. So if you don’t have a specific keyword strand in your account, you won’t get any impressions for it (unless you’re using broad match, but this is just an example). This means that when looking at impression share, the numbers will always be relative to the keywords in an account for any given date range.
Impression Share Goal
To me, the goal should always be to show up in the majority. I’ve historically stuck with 80% as my goal because it is well within the majority of searches done. As keyword maintenance is performed and ad rank improves over time, impression share can increase and get much closer to 100%. But why isn’t the goal just 100%
Impression Share Loss
Impression share loss can happen for a few different reasons. One is pretty simple, and one is pretty complicated with many different fixes. Loss boils down to Rank and Budget.
Loss Due To Budget: There is not enough budget on days ads are running in order to show ads all throughout the day. The simple fix is to add more budget into the account. That will increase the chances of ads showing closer to 100% of the time.
Loss Due to Rank: Your ad rank was not high enough to show for all of the available impressions throughout the day. The simple fix...well there really isn’t one. Landing page experience, keyword bid, historical CTR, Ad Relevance, and a few other factors can all affect ad rank. Each of them should be inspected to see what the true underlying problem is.
Quick Tips
Monitor Impression Share and the companion metrics by adding the columns into the campaign view of your Google Ads account. Impression metrics have also replaced average position in Google Ads. This means that understanding impression metrics is more important than ever for ensuring that your ad show up, and are competitive each time that they do.