How to Increase Search Impression Share?

Posted September 4th, 2020 by Amita & filed under Google Ads Tips.

Before running a paid search campaign, we do our homework with regards to the targeted audiences, bidding, keywords and follow the best practices. But when you do not see the desired results, it’s a wake-up-call to pause and analyze your campaign. One of the performance metric to look into is the search impression share.

In this post, we will discuss about Search Impression Share, factors which cause it to become low, and what can be done to improve it.

Understanding of Search Impression Share

As per Google

Impression share (IS) is the percentage of impressions that your ads receive compared to the total number of impressions that your ads could get.

It is calculated as:

Impression Share = Received Impression / Total Number of Eligible Impression

Impression share is a percentage based metric. Getting desired impressions depends upon the geographical targeting, bids, quality level, campaign settings, etc.

Impression Share depends upon various factors, thus one cannot define an ideal impression share. For instance, if your impression share is 70%, you are already at a good level so increasing bid to improve it will not help you a lot and you will go over budget.

Where Can You Find Impression Share in Google Ads

Follow these steps to find the impression share in the Google Ads interface:

1) Go to your Google Ads account. Click on the Campaign Tab > Click On Column option

2) Select Competitive Metric > Add impression share columns and Apply

How to Improve Search Impression Share

There are many factors that impacts the search impression share. Some of those are:

Geo-Targeting
Keyword Match Type
Quality of your Ad
Targeting Settings
Bidding Strategy
Budget and more.

Keeping a track of search impression will ensure that any loopholes are dealt with immediately.

Here are the 4 things that can help improve the impression share :

Checking Individual Search Terms: Broad Match and Broad Match Modifier helps match your ad to the broader range of possible search terms. If you are losing impression share due to the match type, then consider moving the triggered search terms to stronger match type such as, exact or phrase keyword match type. This will help ascertain the impression share of these search terms separately.

Once you understand which search term has the potential, you can increase the bid for that particular keyword and hence, improve its impression share. By taking these measures, your ads will be seen by more qualified audiences.

The Relevance of Your Ads for Keywords: Improving your ad quality will help to improve its relevance. Your ad quality score is based on the keywords you choose so you need to be serious about this. If you can take good measures to improve your PPC ads, your quality score will increase. By analyzing your Quality Score, you can enhance the overall health of your PPC campaign.

Try to create an ad copy as relevant as possible to your selected keywords and audience. This will save your precious budget and also improve the visibility.

Tracking down your quality score for individual keywords might be utterly time taking. Our Google Ads script can come in handy and help you get desired results without consuming much of your time.

Adjust Geographical Targeting: Impression share will automatically improve when your ads are targeted to geographical locations where people are interested in your product/services. So, ensure that your ads are targeted to the right location.

But what can be done in areas where you are losing impression share? You can increase the bid for them. Doing this will enhance the chances of seizing the impressions and trigger needed traffic to your site.

Increase Your Bids Selectively: . If your CPA goal is $100 and currently, you are at $90, you have the room to increase it by $10 to achieve the goal you are aiming for. This can be done by increasing bids for any low impression keywords, which will eventually help achieve your CPA Goal and also increase the impression share simultaneously.

Your Call

Impression share is an indicator. It helps you to know the low performing keywords. Usually, at once, you might think of pausing low performing keywords but before doing this, think of boosting the overall quality of your keywords and ads.

What options you have in mind to improve impression share? Shoot your thoughts in the comments section.

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