Analyze The Impression Share & Learn More About Your Campaigns

Written by Rocco Alberto Baldassarre
We can define impression share as the ratio between the impressions that you have received for your ads and the number of total impressions you could have been appearing for. It is easy to understand how the goal of each advertiser is to get as many impressions as possible and at the lowest cost possible.

Locating the Impression Share metric

You can add the impression share Column by simply clicking on your campaign tab, then clicking on column and customize columns. All impression share metrics will be listed in the sub-menu called “Competitive metrics”.

You will have the option to select among different metrics, which mainly differ by the network that your campaigns are targeting.

Search network metrics include:

- Search Impr. Share: The ratio between the impressions that you have received for your ads and the number of total impressions you could have been appearing for on the search network

- Search Exact match IS: It is calculated the same way as the standard impression share but it refers only to search terms that matched your keywords exactly

- Search Lost IS (rank): The percentage of impressions you lost because of a low ad position

- Search Lost IS (budget): The percentage of impressions you lost because of a budgeting issue

Display network metrics include:

- Display Impr. Share: The ratio between the impressions that you have received for your ads and the number of total impressions you could have been appearing for on the display network

- Relative CTR: It is a measure that tells you how your ads are performing compared to competitors’ ads on the display network. It is the ratio between your CTR and the and the average CTR of other advertisers in the same section of a website 

- Display Lost IS (rank): The percentage of impressions you lost because of a low ad position

- Display Lost IS (budget): The percentage of impressions you lost because of a budgeting issue

Reading what we just mentioned above, it is easy to understand how:

impression share + Lost IS (Rank) + Lost IS (Budget) = 100%.

Some useful tips to interpret the impression share value:

- When the Impression Share (IS) is low, it is probably due to a combination of your level of budget and your CPC. Low impression shares are always attributable to either a budget that is always used up before the end of the day (meaning that you are missing to appear for all of the impressions following the complete use of the budget) or to a low advertisement position due to the fact that you are willing to pay a max CPC that is not enough to let you show up among the first positions on the search network.

- When the Lost IS (Budget) is high, you can reduce it by either increasing the budget or by focusing it on a smaller group of keywords.

- When the Lost IS (Rank) is high, it means that you can reduce it by increasing the CPC and consequently show up in a better advertising position.

- The impression share on the display network is likely to be very low for all of your campaigns. The display network has millions of placement opportunities and therefore it is almost impossible to appear for them all

-  The ideal impression share on the search network should be at about 80

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