Are you paying attention to the impression share of your online ads? Whenever your ad is displayed on a web page, that’s counted as an impression. An informative metric that helps to shed light on how well your ad is doing is known as impression share. It’s calculated by dividing the total number of impressions you received divided by how many impressions were eligible, which compares the performance of your ads to the performance of other ads in the same category.
What Can You Learn From Impression Share?
Awareness of impression share provides insight into how well you’re engaging your audience. If you’re only engaging a small percentage of your audience, something needs to be changed. Things that are used to estimate eligible impressions include:
- Targeting settings
- Approval statuses
- Bids
- Ad quality
If your paid ads aren’t performing well, there’s room for improvement starting with keywords. Boosting your impression share can help to boost your profits.
Your Share of Impressions
There are several different kinds of impression share, and each can be valuable to the results you’re getting. These include:
- Search impression share. The metric of search impression share is impacted by your budget. With a limited daily budget, once your budget has been met, your ad is no longer shown. This may make it look like your ad is getting less engagement than it should.
- Target impression share. This gives you an automated approach to bidding and setting automated bids for your campaign.
- Display impression share. There are millions of websites and apps that are part of Google Display Network (GDN). Over 90 percent of websites are on GDN, and the display impression share refers to the impression share of ads on GDN.
- Exact match impression share. This allows you to hone in on specific keywords.
- Search lost impression share. This shows you how much you’re losing out on because of budget limitations or because of low ad rank.
Impression share metrics help you to determine whether keywords aren’t performing because of your budget or because your bids are too low. Bids must be high enough to appear in competitive positions to capture impressions and generate traffic to your site. Impressions can only be generated as long as your budget lasts.
Improving Impression Share
The steps you need to take to improve your impression share depend on what’s causing your results to not be as good as you’re hoping for. If your search lost impression share (budget) is low, increasing your advertising budget may improve your overall results. If your search lost impression share (rank) is low, think about how you can boost your quality score. Evaluate the past performance of your keywords, the clickthrough rate that’s expected, and the visitor experience on your landing pages. Consider whether you need to use search terms to identify new keywords.
Adjusting your geo-targeting settings may make a difference if you change them to restrict or decrease your location settings. This allows you to focus on targeting a specific area. Work on making your ads as specific and relevant to your audience as possible.
For more help with boosting your impression share, reach out to the experts at Softline Solutions.
