Internet Marketing Services

We just got a new potential client this week (hooray!). While I was going through his account, I realized he’s got low impression share across all campaigns. This prompted me to dig deeper into the account.

Google defines Impression Share as:

Impression share is a metric that represents the percentage of impressions where your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting.

For example, if your keyword has been searched for 1000 times, but your ad only showed  up for 600 out of the 1000 times, then the keyword’s impression share will be 60%, and the rest 40% will be Lost Impression Share.

Lost Impression Share can be categorized into two groups: Lost Impression (Budget) & Lost Impression (Rank).

Google’s definitions for them are:

The data in the Lost Impr. Share (Budget) column represents the impression share you lost due to an insufficient budget.

The data in the Lost Impr. Share (Rank) column represents the impression share you lost due to a poor Ad Rank.

Now, back to the client.

The first thing I checked after realizing the low impression share was to see if the campaigns are constantly hitting their daily budgets.  Obviously, if the campaign doesn’t have enough budgets to run 24/7, of course the campaign will lose impression share. But this isn’t the cause in this case. The client has a daily budget that’s enough sustain the account for the whole month.

Therefore, I moved on to check the ranking of the keywords. If the keywords aren’t showing up on the first page of the search results, then of course they will lose impression share (assuming the searcher doesn’t reach the second or whatever page the ad is being displayed). But again, this is the case. All the keywords have rankings of 6 or higher.

Now I’m confused. What else can cause the low impression share?

While I’m investing this, I realized the Exact Match Impression Share (This column reports the percentage of impressions that your campaign could have received if your keywords were set to Exact Match) are close to 90% across all campaigns. This sheds some light on me.

KEYWORD MATCH TYPES CAN AFFECT YOUR IMPRESSION SHARE!!!

And this makes sense. Doesn’t matter how high the ranking of your keywords are, if they are in broad match, they won’t always be triggered by potential search queries. There can be a million different search queries that will trigger a broad match keyword, and you can’t expect Google to find your broad match keyword to be relevant to all those search queries. If Google doesn’t find your keyword relevant, then you won’t likely to show up on the first page, and therefore, you will lose that impression share.

Impression Share is such a hidden metric within AdWords, not a lot of people pay attention to it. But if you use this information well, you can really boost your account exposure to a new level.

And, Yes, the new clients an exhaustive list of broad match keywords in his account.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services. If you need help with PPC management or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies reduce their paid advertising cost by as much as 48% and increase AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. See our internet marketing case studies.