Ad impression share, also known as search impression share, is often easy to ignore and most of the time it’s underutilized. But one of the most effective ways to enhance the overall performance of your Ads account is by maximizing your impression share for high performing keywords.
What is impression share?
The simple formula for calculating ad impression share is
Impression share = actual number of impressions / total number of impressions your ads were eligible for
The number of impressions you have received divided by the number of impressions you were eligible to get is denoted as ad impression share. These results are reported in form of percentage.
As an example, a 50% impression share implies that out of all considerable auctions you could have appeared, you appeared for only half of them.
Different Types of Impression Share
Search Impression Share – Used for impressions that are generated through the Search Network.
Display impression share – Used for impressions that are generated through the Display Network.
Search lost impression share (budget) – This tells us the percentage of impressions in Search Network that someone is lost out on. It usually happens because of low or an insufficient budget.
Display lost impression share (budget) – This shows the percentage of impressions that someone loses for the Display Network due to low budget.
Search lost impression share (rank) – This shows the lost percentage of impressions due to low ad rank on Search Network.
Display lost impression share (rank) – This shows the lost percentage of impressions due to low ad rank on Display Network.
Search exact match impression share – A Search Network impression share for search queries that exactly matched targeted keywords.
How to improve impression share for shopping ads:
Increase Budget: Low budget is one the biggest possible reasons for low impression share. Budget is the one that often limits the campaign. For instance, we can see that the campaign is performing really well and incredibly profitable but the budget is kept very low, for eg, $10. So everyday those $10 get used up when they could have spent $100.
There were $90 worth of searches but since the budget got used and couldn’t use more budget resulting in an ultimate loss of impression share. Here is an account that is “Limited by Budget” is capping performance.
Bidding: Increasing bids can improve the probability that an ad will show up more often for a given ad auction.
Reduce Regional Targets: You are very likely to notice an increase in impression share if you reduce your regional targets. But then there’s a catch. Reducing regional targets also results in reduction of potential number of impressions available to you.
Optimize Product Titles: Modifying your product titles according to how shoppers search for your product is another way to give a push to impression share. The key to effectively optimize your product title lies in user search query data. Editing your title to make them look more like search terms, makes them more relevant to users ultimately resulting in impression share increase.
Reconsider Mobile Strategy: Mobile strategy is one of the best places to focus if you are looking to increase impression share. You are very likely missing out on impression share if you are not showing ads on mobile devices.
It’s the only place where shoppers research and discover new products. If you feel like creating a separate campaign only for mobile ads is not worth it, you can simply increase the bids for mobile devices. That’ll also do the job.
In the end, there is no need to simply throw in a huge amount of budget to get a bigger slice of impression share. Instead, smartly segmenting and spending strategically, you can showcase yourself to the right audience even when the competition grows.
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