What is Impression Share in Google Ads?

By: Jyll Saskin Gales, Google Ads Coach

What is Impression Share, and why should you care about it? In this blog post, we'll break down this important Google Ads metric and discuss how you can use it to improve your ad performance.

What is Impression Share?

Impression Share (IS) is a metric that tells you how often your ads are shown compared to how often they could be shown. For example, if your ads are eligible to show on 100 searches but only appear on 11 of them, your Impression Share is 11%.

Why is Impression Share Important?

While Impression Share itself doesn't directly determine your ad performance, it's a valuable diagnostic tool. By understanding your Impression Share and the reasons why you might be losing out on impressions, you can identify areas for improvement and optimize your campaigns.

Types of Impression Share Loss

There are two main reasons why you might be losing Impression Share:

1. Search Lost IS (Budget): This means you're not getting impressions because your budget is too low. Remember, you only pay for clicks, not impressions. But if you run out of budget, Google will stop showing your ads.
2. Search Lost IS (Rank): This means your ad rank isn't high enough to get impressions. Ad rank is determined by your bid amount and the quality of your ads. If your bids are too low or your ad quality is poor, your ads may not show as often. 

How to Increase Impression Share

There are two main ways to increase your Impression Share:

1. Increase your serving potential: This means increasing your budget or improving your ad rank. You can improve your ad rank by increasing your bids or improving the quality of your ads.
2. Decrease your eligible impressions: This means narrowing your targeting so that your ads are eligible to show on fewer searches. You can do this by targeting fewer locations, using fewer keywords, or using audience targeting.

Additional Resources for Google Ads campaign optimization

To learn more about the topics discussed in this blog post, check out these episodes of the Inside Google Ads podcast:

• Episode 1 and Episode 15: Bidding
• Episode 7 and Episode 16: Budgets
• Episode 11: Ad quality
• Episode 18: Metrics that matter

By understanding and optimizing your Impression Share, you can ensure that your ads are seen by the right people at the right time, ultimately leading to better campaign performance.