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Impression share report is one of the best sources to determine the health of your AdWords PPC campaigns and take proactive actions to optimize your AdWords PPC campaigns. You can use the impression share report to determine

1.    How well your campaigns are performing overall for the keywords you are advertising
2.    If you are losing opportunities to reach target market because of ‘Low advertising budget’ or ‘Low ranking & Low quality score’

The impression share report gives data across Google search, search partners and content network. When you are creating the report choose Ad Distribution and Ad Distribution with search partners. These metrics will give you break down of your campaigns’ performance across Google search, search partners and content network. This is important for performance across Google search, search partners and content network are different. You don’t want to be looking at overall averages across all networks to make all the wrong decisions.

The following are the metrics you need to understand properly before using the impression share report to analyze your PPC campaigns.

• Impression Share (IS) –the total number of times your ads were shown (i.e. impressions) for all keywords in your account for the     various match types (Exact, Phrase, Broad and Extended Broad)

• Lost IS (Rank) – Impressions lost due to low rankings.

• Lost IS (Budget) – Impression lost due to low budget.

• Exact IS – The number of impressions lost for keywords from your campaigns that exactly matched the user search query. Please note     that Exactly matched doesn’t mean exact match. E.x. Your campaigns might contain keywords in only phrase or broad match. But when a     user searches for the exact keyword, your ads will be triggered for those keywords. So AdWords considers keywords that exactly     matches user query irrespective of match type to determine Lost Impressions.

Impression Share (IS) is what you got and Lost IS (Rank) and Lost IS (Budget) are what you lost. So if you add up the 3 columns, it will total 100%. The formula will look like this:

Impression Share (IS) + Lost IS (Rank) + Lost IS (Budget) = 100%

I will use the below sample data to show how to analyze and optimize your PPC campaigns.

AdWords-Impression_Share-Report

Low advertising budget
Determining whether you are losing opportunities to reach customers due to low budget is the most easiest and direct. From the data sample you can clearly see if you are losing opportunities due to low budget and take proper action to allocate budget.

Low ranking
This is a bit tricky. For example if you look at campaign ‘D’, it shows the campaign lost 59% due to low ranking. Campaign ‘D’ hasn’t lost impressions due to budget.

Remember Ad Rank = Max. CPC X Quality Score (Q.S.)

If you are not missing impressions due to budget then it’s probably due to Q.S. So make sure to check how well your keywords are doing in terms of Q.S. If the Keywords don’t have a Q.S. of at least 7, then there is room for improvement. Another way to ensure if you are losing because of Q.S. is check your actual keyword rankings and the Q.S. using Placement/Keyword Performance report.

If your keywords are in top positions but your Q.S. is very low then you are losing because of Q.S.  Once possible explanation is the impressions share data is based on all match types. Currently the Q.S. is low enough not allowing your ads to be shown for other relevant search queries in broad and extended broad match.

Exact Match IS
This is the most important metric for if you have high Exact Match IS, then you are reaching your target market for the most important and effective keywords. If you are losing significantly then it means your competitors are doing well and you are losing. In the above image you can see Campaign D, E and F present significant opportunities to improve the Exact match impression share and generate conversions. But you prioritize and chose to start with Campaign F for its losing opportunities under Google search.

In general advertisers don’t have much control over ad display on Search partners. So optimize for Google search and then try to review other search channels. Advertisers should try getting the most from Exact Match impression share. There is no specific good or bad numbers to gauge and it depends. But in my opinion anything above 90% is good.

You can also check the following links from Google AdWords for more about Impression share.

https://AdWords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66817

http://AdWords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=52760

http://AdWords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77506

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.