Impression Share (5)

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

Impression share = impressions / total eligible impressions

Eligible impressions are estimated using many factors, including targeting settings, approval statuses, and quality. Impression share data is available for campaigns, ad groups, product groups (for Shopping campaigns), and keywords.

Impression share is a good way to understand whether your ads might reach more people if you increase your bid or budget.

Absolute top impression share

Absolute top impression share (ATIS) is the percentage of your Shopping ad impressions that are shown in the most prominent Shopping position. There’s only one “absolute top impression” per auction so your absolute top impression share is an important indicator of your overall prominence.

Absolute top impression share = absolute top impressions / total eligible top impressions

Absolute top impression share can help you understand whether your products might appear more prominently in Shopping ad results if you increase your bid or budget. ATIS is available for campaigns, ad groups, and product groups (for Shopping campaigns).

How it works overall

To estimate impression share, Google looks at the ad auctions over the course of the day, and uses internal data such as quality for you and other participants in the same ad auctions. 

Impression share includes all auctions where your ad showed, and all auctions where your ad is competitive enough to show. For example, it could include auctions where your ad could show at twice its current bid, but could exclude auctions where your ad is estimated to need a 1,000% bid increase in order to appear. 

Keep in mind, impression share is based on an estimate of when your ad was competitive in the auction. Small fluctuations over time don’t necessarily indicate that action is needed. Changes to your bids, quality, or Google’s ad systems may change the set of auctions in which the system estimates you were competitive.

Note: Search partners doesn’t distinguish between “top” vs. “others” and won’t be included in impression share data

These impression you could have received based on different factors like current ads’ targeting settings, approval statuses, bids, and Quality Scores. Impression share data is available at the campaign, ad group and keyword levels.

Impression share results come in the percentage,  for example, a 50% impression share means that out of all the auctions you could have been shown, you were only included in about half of them. It is same like glass-half-empty type situation that means you lost out on 50% of traffic.

To further know about what is Impression share now you understand that impression share is a valuable metric that will allow you to determine areas in your account that need improvement and are eligible to receive more impressions. Considering the optimization seriously, it can help you boost overall traffic and of course site engagement.

What is good impression share?

100% Search impression share is ideal no doubt but getting this ideal figure is not an easy thing. It depends on your goals, the keywords which you are using, branded keywords and non-branded keywords definitely have their own impression shares. 95% impression share should be considered good in case of branded keywords and in case of non-branded keywords 80% should be the bench mark.

But if your keyword is very competitive and you have a limited budget then you should expect and aiming for search impression share near to 60%.  If you are getting less values on search impression share then it is time to optimize and focus on things in your campaign which can help to maximize impression share.

Every click has an opportunity cost. It is possible for the impression you are getting you might be clicking on something which can further lead to conversion but it is not always true that every impression is converted. So getting higher impression share is also not very good, yes it is true! You have to focus on quality not quantity.

What if you are getting 90% impression share but your goal was to get qualified leads and you get nothing out of it then this 90% is useless. You have to see again what good impression share is as mentioned before. So when focusing and analyzing impression share you have to be skeptic enough if you are getting quality impression which is playing an important role in a customer journey.

If you are not getting good impression share then you can also check why your impression share was lost? Was it lost because of rank or was it lost due to less availably of budget.  Search impression share is very closely tightened with budget. You can increase the budget and see the impact on impression share but it is not recommended to increase the budget without looking at the other factors like conversion rate, bids, targeting, quality score and CTR.

Types of Impression Share in Google Ads

There is more to impression share than just a simple number; there are different facets that you can use to get an even greater depth of analysis. The different breakdowns for impression share are as follows:

• Search impression share – your impression share strictly for impressions generated through the Search Network.
• Display impression share – your impression share strictly for impressions generated through the Display Network.
• Search lost impression share (budget) – the percentage of impressions you lost out on for the Search Network due to an insufficient budget (this is available at the campaign level only).
• Display lost impression share (budget) – the percentage of impressions you lost out on for the Display Network due to an insufficient budget (this is available at the campaign level only).
• Search lost impression share (rank) – the percentage of impressions you lost out on for the Search Network due to low ad rank.
• Display lost impression share (rank) – the percentage of impressions you lost out on for the Display Network due to low ad rank.
• Search exact match impression share – your impression share from the Search Network for search queries that matched your keywords exactly.