Online advertising is booming.
However, when you’re launching digital campaigns, you want to be sure that you’re maximizing your efforts – and profits – by increasing the impression your ad gets. Your impression percentage shows you how well your ad is doing compared to the potential target audience. As you increase them, you can increase both engagement and profits.
If you only address a small part of your target group, analyzing your impression share is usually a good starting point. Increasing this value can bring you ads to the top of the search engine results page (SERP). – – and ultimately generate more engagement for your campaigns.
In this post, we explain what Impression Share is and the different types your marketing team can track during your online advertising campaigns.
What is impression share?
Impression approval is an ad metric that compares the performance of your ads against the performance of other ads in its category. This is calculated by comparing the total number of impressions with the number of impressions that can potentially be received.
Every time your ad is shown on a webpage, it is counted as an impression. Ads can get more impressions for a number of reasons, especially if they’re familiar, attractive, and relevant with keywords.
By following the impression approval process, you can clearly see how well your ad is performing and how you can improve it over time – – especially through keywords. While there are plenty of metrics you can use to track the performance of your ads. However, impression sharing can help you identify the flaws in your ad so you can fix them and make them more attractive to your audience.
Read on to learn more about the different types of impressions your business can track to generate more engagement for their ad campaigns.
Share types of impressions
Find Impression Share
Impression approval for search is the impression approval of your ad on a search network. According to Google, a search network is “a group of search-related websites that your ads may appear on” including Google search results, Google apps like Maps and Shopping, and Google search partner websites. This metric divides the impressions your ad gets by the number of impressions it could get on the search network.
This metric is heavily influenced by the budget. If you have a low daily budget on Google, your ad will stop showing once you reach your budget. This means that your ad may get impressions but is still lacking more engagement because of that daily limit.
If you don’t want to spend more on your campaign, you can improve the percentage of search impressions by focusing on your ads’ Quality Score, target, bid, and conversion rate. These metrics measure the effectiveness of your ad, and improving them will result in more engagement.
Show impression share
Google defines its display network as a group of over two million websites, videos, and apps that can serve ads. Display Network websites reach up to 90% of internet users and can serve your ads in a specific context or audience.
Display campaigns allow you to increase your ad placements to improve impression sharing. However, you will need to adjust your budget to accommodate this increase as well. You can also reduce the number of placements to make your campaign cheaper. However, this will reduce the number of times your ad is shown. The best thing to do is to test the number of placements until you reach a point where you have optimized impression sharing without going over your campaign budget.
Target impression share
Target impression approval provides an automated approach to bidding on ads. This tool allows you to set automated bids for your campaign which will give your ad a better chance of reaching the top of the SERP. And with a more prominent position on a search results page, your ad is likely to get more impressions over time.
Although impression approval is only available per campaign, you can track target impression approval for all of your campaigns at the same time. There are plenty of options to customize too. For example, you can choose to bid on a specific section of the page – like the top half – or for specific times and locations.
AdWords Impression Share
Wondering how to access your impression share data in Google Ads?
Once you’re signed into your ad account, just go to Campaigns> Columns> Change Columns> Contest Metrics> Impression Share and click Save.
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Your impression approval will now be displayed in a table that you can download.
Exact match impression share
Exact match of match impressions is exactly what it sounds like. This metric compares the number of impressions your ad has received against the number of impressions obtained for searches that match your exact keywords. Exactly matching impression sharing can help improve your keywords and improve your ads.
Find Lost Impression Share
The “Looking for Lost Impressions (Budge)” column shows the percentage of impressions you are missing because of your budget. A high percentage can mean that investing in a larger budget can increase your advertising efforts and your sales in the long run.
The “Search for lost impressions (rank)” column shows the number of impressions you have lost due to a low rank. When this percentage is high, advertisers should consider how to use Quality Score and cost-per-click rates to increase rank. The quality score evaluates the performance of your keywords in the past, the ad relevance, the landing page experience and the expected click rate.
Consider making adjustments to your campaign’s keywords and creative resources if the search lost impressions (rank). A relevant ad with great keywords will rank higher in the SERP, which can lead to more impressions, clicks, and sales.
If you’d like to manually determine the impression share for an ad, there’s a formula below to help you calculate it.
Inpression Share Formula
The impression share is calculated by dividing the number of impressions received by the number of total impressions the ad was eligible for.
As Google explains“Eligible impressions are estimated using many factors, including targeting settings, approval status, and quality.” Once the maximum number of impressions is set, all you have to do is divide the number of impressions the ad will receive by the maximum number of impressions that Google will decide it’s eligible.
We can see how this formula is written in the example below.
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We can also modify this formula to determine the total number of impressions our ad is eligible for. For example, if we already know our percentage of impressions, we can reformat the formula to make it that way.
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Example of an impression share formula
For example, let’s say we’ve created an ad and Google says there are 5,000 potential impressions available. After monitoring our ad’s performance for a month, we had approximately 4,000 impressions. This would mean that our impression share is 80% (4,000 recorded impressions / 5,000 available impressions = 80% impression share).
Impression approval is a handy metric for determining how well an ad campaign is doing and what your team can do to achieve its full potential. By tracking the approval of impressions, you can automate bids, optimize your budget, and track keywords and quality metrics to reach your audiences more often and generate greater brand awareness and profits.
Check out this helpful list for other helpful ways to increase your online ad engagement SEO tips.