Google Adwords Impression Share Metrics for Campaigns

Published October 21, 2009 by Garry Przyklenk Google Adwords, Google Analytics

Once upon a Google Adwords report, the impression share metric represented a peculiar, but intriguing metric.  Impression share can be thought of as a “share of voice” metric which measures the total impression your ads generate in a campaign out of the total available impressions for your keywords and targeted geography.  However, campaigns can be large, complex messes full of different ad groups and match types, so an impression share metric was relatively useless, unless your campaigns were simple.  Although not revealing their quality score hand completely, Google has bestowed more meaningful insights to advertisers, if you know where to look.

Unfortunately, as I alluded to in the introduction, impression share metrics are only available in the Google Adwords Campaign Report.  However, unlike a few months ago, Google has included new metrics you can use to diagnose low impression share numbers and adjust your campaigns accordingly.

A few definitions first:

  • Impression share: percentage of impressions your ads generate with respect to the total impressions available for your targeting options (keyword, region, etc)
  • Lost IS (rank): the percentage of impressions your ads are losing because of poor quality score, or paid search rank
  • Lost IS (budget): the percentage of impressions your ads are losing because of insufficient campaign budget allocation
  • Exact Match IS: the percentage of impressions your ads generate with respect to all impressions available EXCLUSIVELY for those ever-important exact match keywords

The impression share metric will mean absolutely nothing for advertisers that bid on relatively generic keywords that potentially trigger a whole heck of a lot of impressions for nonsensical broad match phrases.  However, for those of us that target phrase and exact match keywords, these metrics can be extremely insightful.

For example, let’s say you have a relatively optimized campaign, with a good mix of exact match keywords and phrase match keywords, you might expect to score very high for “Exact Match IS”, if your campaign isn’t limited by budget.  Theoretically, if your budget is high enough to accommodate ALL impressions, you might only lose impression share due to quality score or rank.  That’s extremely helpful, because it tells you your keywords are right on, budget is fine, but either your ad’s quality score (the actual text, offer, call to action, etc) or bid might need to be adjusted.

If you’re a super control freak, like me, you may consider breaking out your exact and phrase match keywords into separate campaigns, at least temporarily.  Until Google makes IS available on the ad group level, large campaigns with several ad groups and potentially hundreds of keywords might yield meaningless IS numbers.

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  • I just confirmed with Google that negative keywords ARE taken into account. Impression share reports only take into account when your ads are actually eligible for the auction. They aren't eligible if your negative keywords keep you from showing.
  • Maybe good to know, but negatives are not taken into account when calculating the Impression Share. If you have many words excluded, it's possible that your impression share is very low.
  • In talking with a Google representative a few months ago, I was told that "Exact Match Impression Share" isn't just for exact match keywords. It is instead the impression share your campaign would have received if all the keywords were exact match. So if you have "blue widget" as a broad match, and your keyword is triggered for a search for "blue widget", this would be 100% exact match impression share. This metric is to be used to make sure you are getting good impression share coverage on all the keywords you are explicitly trying to target.
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