NOTE: In January 2009 I wrote a three post series on Impression Share. To make reading and linking easier, these posts are combined below. Enjoy. —————————————————
Impression Share Deep Dive
What if your ads didn’t run? You picked the keywords, placed the bids, people searched, but your ads didn’t show up? It happens every day. In almost every one of your campaigns. It’s documented in a metric called Impression Share (in Google Adwords, no MSN or Yahoo equivalent yet.) Impression Share displays the percentage of the time that your ads were displayed to people who entered search queries which match your keywords (at their specified match types). 100 minus Impression Share is the percentage of the time your ads didn’t run when you thought they would. If your campaigns are profitable, the missing impressions are missing profit. Who can afford missing profit these days? Three things stand between you and this extra profit:
- Getting your Impression Share metrics.
- Knowing what they mean.
- Taking the steps necessary to drive Impression Share up.
Finding Impression Share To get an impression share report most people have to go to the Reports tab in Adwords, build a Campaign report, and edit the fields to include IS, Lost IS (Budget), Lost IS (Rank), and Exact Match IS. You can’t access these metrics at the AdGroup level (a shame we’ll decry another time).
- Lost IS (Budget) = The percentage of impressions lost due to budget constraints
- Lost IS (Rank) = The percentage of impressions lost due to low Ad Rank (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score).
So Impression Share + Lost IS (Budget) + Lost IS (Rank) = 100%. These tell you what you got and what you didn’t get, and why. The last one is trickier. For that reason I don’t think it gets the attention it deserves. And I’ll admit that I didn’t understand it until today when I started digging into this topic while doing some analysis work.
- Exact Match IS = The impression share of your campaigns as if your keywords were set to Exact Match. That’s the official Google definition – the one that seems generally misunderstood.
So let’s try it a different way. Exact Match IS tells you the percentage of the time when your ads were displayed for search queries that exactly match the keywords in your campaign. One minus Exact Match IS is the percentage of the time when someone typed EXACTLY your keywords in as their search query and Google still didn’t show them your ad. Using Impression Share The IS metrics are great because they tell you things you could otherwise never know about your campaigns. Foremost, they tell what you’re getting and what you’re missing in terms of impressions – and from there the calculation of missing clicks, conversions, and even revenue/profit is rather simple (see chart 2 below). This is huge. We can finally at least partially answer the perennial question ‘How much more could I make from my paid search campaigns?’. Start With Exact Match IS Although it somehow seems offered as an afterthought metric, I’d recommend starting by looking at your Exact Match IS. This simplifies the world and if you’re buying anything near the right keywords provides a sense of how you’re doing in terms of getting shown to the people looking for you.
Impression Share Options in Google Adwords Report Configuration
If you use ClickEquations, you can see Impression Share right in the Campaign reports, or in any report or dashboard built in Excel with ClickEquations Analyst.
Understanding Impression Share There are four Impression Share Metrics. IS, IS Budget, IS Rank, and IS Exact. The first three are relatively straight forward. The last is a bit confusing.
- Impression Share = The percentage of the time your ads where shown (for this campaign) out of the times it was eligible to be shown. Eligible means the search matched your keyword, your account was active, the geo-targeting and day-parting and other settings were right, etc.
The next two metrics explain the Impression Share you didn’t get. If your Impression Share is 70%, then your Lost Impression Share is 30%. But why didn’t your ads run those times? The next two metrics tell you:
- At this point we can look at the IS metrics for our ‘large volume and profitable’ campaign and reasonably obsess about every % we miss.
- We can watch and work on the ‘marginal keywords and groups’ for these high profit categories, and make smart choices to improve them both in performance and IS.
- And we can watch the IS for all our other categories but probably not do too much about them.
A Bag of Rocks and Diamonds Let me try and make the whole point another way.
- Isn’t it possible that the impressions you’re missing are the best – meaning highest converting – impressions? Or the most competitive impressions – those others are trying the hardest to take away from you? Do you really want to buy only the remnant impressions? .
- Or it could be that you’re getting the best ones, and missing the worst impressions – particularly if you have much lower impression share than impression share exact match (and if you’re keywords are well chosen). It could be that you’re missing lots of wierdo-broad-match Google Gumbo queries that you wouldn’t want anyway.
The point is that lost impression share is an uncontrolled mystery. If your campaigns have high amounts (say over 30%) lost impression share you’re letting Google decide how and when to advertise your site and spend your money. Shouldn’t you decide? Divide And Conquer As discussed in post II in this series, your first step is to break down your campaigns into logical units for which IS becomes meaningful. IS metrics across campaigns with dozens of dis-similar ad-groups aren’t actionable. Of course, re-organizing campaigns is a large and difficult process. Adwords Editor makes it possible in a simpler matter than before, but it’s still a lot of work. At a minimum your ‘must win’ ad groups should be isolated in ways that give you good visibility into their IS performance. Your core brand terms, which we’ve written about before in terms of organization, are a good place to start. Then I’d suggest creating a slum for your losers, misfits, and keywords of questionable origin. Every campaign has them, ad groups that are a bit of stretch, a test, perform terribly but are hung onto for sentimental value, whatever.
- Build out your match type keyword traps. Increasing coverage of exact and phrase match terms, and bidding them properly, should garner more impressions for those terms for broad-match heavy campaigns.
- Harvest search queries to increase negatives and add new phrase/exact match keywords. Every step to remove excess and intelligently expand your keywords improves the value of the IS measurement and hopefully the number as well.
- Check and address quality score across your campaign. Ad Rank = bid x QS, and often QS isn’t thought of enough.
- Write and test more text ads. This is the most overlooked effort in PPC, can drive quality score which drives ad-rank, and more importantly can multiple CTR by many times which grows everything positive.
- Bid differently. As a component of ad-rank, which plays a huge role in Impression Share, bids are a factor. Notice that bids don’t have to be your first or only lever 🙂 (And watch for our upcoming blog post series on bidding.)
Impression Share is an interesting, and perhaps unexpected, broad measure of the quality of our campaigns because of how it’s influenced by the wide range of factors suggested above. Paid search is way too complex, and still to opaque (and perhaps inconsistent and imperfect) to pretend that it’s a clear measure that will track ‘campaign quality’ in any precise way – but it is an indicator and one we can use in surprisingly far-reaching way. Impression Share Wrap Up A lot of the paid search process happens without enough feedback or context. Any available metrics that help us understand and measure the funnel we’re trying to push people through, therefore, is very important.