Impression Share: A New Way To Represent Your Campaign's Performance

As seen on Google AdWords help center, just launched is AdWords' new metric called Impression share that represents the percentage of impressions where your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting. This metric is available at the campaign and account level for search.

“Inside AdWords gives a quick rundown of what each Impression Share column represents:

1. Impression Share (IS): The percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting. This metric is available at the campaign and account level for search.
2. Lost IS (Rank): The percentage of impressions lost due to low Ad Rank (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score).
3. Lost IS (Budget): The percentage of impressions lost due to budget constraints.

For example, say you own a small lawn furniture business and you're using AdWords to sell your products. You're curious to know if you're missing out on potential sales by not appearing every time users search on your keywords. To compare how often your ads are showing to the total opportunities they have to show, run a campaign- or account-level performance report that includes the new Impression Share columns.

Using our lawn furniture example, the Impression Share results in the above report may be within your expectations given you:

* are small business,

* target your ads to one state (e.g. Arizona), and

* use ad scheduling so your ads only show on the weekdays when your store is open.

The above conditions help establish your ads' total opportunities to show. Any opportunities to show outside of Arizona or on the weekends do not count against your Impression Share since Impression Share is only measured against the opportunities you're interested in. In contrast, if you targeted more states or scheduled your ads to appear over the weekend, you might see your Impression Share percentage decrease since your ads would have many more opportunities to show.”

Read Google AdWords Help Center To simply make impression share part of your performance reports at the account- or campaign-level and you can find instructions on how to include the metric in your next report here.

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