Top 10 Ways to Improve Your Impression Share in Google Adwords

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Earlier this month, Google Adwords rolled out a number of Impression Share reporting enhancements, which let search marketers learn of missed opportunities due to low ad rank, weak quality scores or budget caps. Advertisers can now break out their ad spend reporting by Display, and Search networks, as well as by hour of the day.

Here are 10 ways to maximize the use of Adwords Impression Share reports.

1. Review the impression share metrics on your best performing campaigns on a regular basis.
2. Make sure budget caps are not limiting the traffic of your top performing campaigns.
3. Make sure low ad ranking is also not limiting your top performing campaigns. Adwords segments out those two impactful metrics as lost IS (budget) and lost IS (rank).
4. In reviewing your Impression Share, in most cases you’ll want to rely on the Exact Match IS metric, which indicates the percentage of impressions that you received for searches that exactly matched your keyword divided by the estimated number of exact match impressions that you were eligible to receive (in the Search Network Only).
5. Hour of Day segmentation allows you to evaluate how your ad coverage varies by the hour. This is especially helpful data if you know, or suspect, that conversions are lower during a certain part of the day, and you are working with a limited budget.
6. If a lot of clicks and ad spend occur at a certain time of day (e.g.- 10 a.m., according to the Hour of Day feature), but generate few conversions, you may want to day-part (exclude/pause) the campaign during that hour of day.
7. Consider testing and analyzing how pausing that time-frame impacts your overall daily conversions. Sometimes day-parting leads to fewer conversions later in the day because consumers didn’t see your ad earlier in the day when they were researching products or comparison shopping.
8. Review the Lost IS (rank) metric to learn what impressions were missed due to a weak ad rank.
9. To improve your ad rank, consider improving your Quality Score by strengthening the keyword-ad text relevancy.
10. If your keywords have a strong Quality Score (7 or higher) already, but your ad rank is low, simply increase your bids.