For businesses to increase the chances of generating more clicks from their ads, they need to improve the number of times the ad appears for a search query result. Impressions is directly proportional to the clicks received, so ensuring that you make your ad show successfully for all relevant user queries directly impacts the clicks.
AdWords reporting metrics captures the details of the impression share and the reason for losing out on impressions. This information can influence further action steps to be taken. So, before implementing a strategy for improving impressions the first step would be to analyze the historical data.
The details about impressions can be tracked by the following metrics
- Search Impression Share – it captures the impression received divided by the impressions your ad was eligible for.
- Search Exact Match Impression Share – it shows the percentage of impressions where your search terms and keywords matched exactly
- Search Lost Impression Share (ad rank) – percentage of impressions your ad missed due to a poor ad rank. A high rate here would imply that your ad rank needs to be improved upon.
- Search Lost Impression Share (budget) – it shows the estimate of how often your ads missed impressions due to low budget.
These metrics can be added to your reporting by going to Columns> Modify Columns> Competitive Metrics
In the post How To Increase Keyword Impressions In AdWords?, we have discussed in detail the various measures to increase your keyword impressions. Adding on to the points mentioned already, advertisers can also do the following:
(Update as on 22nd October 2019: As Target Search Page Location Bidding feature is been migrated to Target Impression Share so below point is no more valid.)
1. Trying a different bidding approach especially if you are losing out on impressions due to low ad rank. You can get this information by looking at the Search Lost Impression Share (ad rank) data or the Avg. Pos. of your ads. Altering your bidding strategy and try the Target search page location bidding to bring your ads to the top of page or on the first page search results. Google then alters your bids to show your ads on the top of the first page or anywhere in the first page (whatever you choose in the bidding settings)
2. Improve your ad messaging to ensure that the presence of your ad in the first page search result drives results. Alter the ad copy of ads with a quality score low because of poor ad relevance. A compelling ad messaging will do rest of the work if your ad is being shown in volume.
3. Switch your ad rotation settings to ‘Optimize: prefer best performing ads’. With the recent change announced by Google, ad rotation settings has been limited to two options including ‘Do not optimize:rotate indefinitely, in addition to the one mentioned. Choosing the optimize option will push those ads more often that are getting more impressions and driving more conversions and clicks.
4. Relook at your location targeting and opt for those locations where your ads are getting displayed the most. In this manner you show your ads to interested users and are also able to generate the results resulted from increase in the impression share.
With these action items, you can take a step towards improving your impressions and hence your CTR. Eventually the paid channel is all about making alterations, learning from mistakes and optimizing to drive the results desired from this platform.
Related Links:
Stop the wasted ad spend. Get more conversions from the same ad budget.
Our customers save over $16 Million per year on Google and Amazon Ads.