Last year Google introduced Impression Share reports to their list of reporting options, giving AdWords users greater insight into the performance of their Search campaigns. Fully understood, these reports can be invaluable in calculating projections, measuring the impact of offline advertising on online campaigns, as well as in day to day optimizations.

Currently, Google offers four types of Impression Share reports: Impression Share, Lost IS (Budget), Lost IS (Rank), and Exact Match IS. Here’s a breakdown of each report:

Impression Share (IS) – Google defines Impression Share as: “the percentage of impressions where your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting.” By market, Google is referring to the current campaign settings (i.e. DMA Targeting, Day-Parting, Language, etc…). In essence, Google is able to look at campaign settings and active keywords of an existing AdWords campaign to determine just how much of the total available impressions were captured. Thus, if your campaign is only targeting New York City, the impression share reports are based on the available impression coming from New York City.

Lost IS (Budget) – This report gives lost impression share as a result of insufficient budget. For example, an AdWords campaign that consistently hits its daily cap is clearly missing out some traffic. By running a Lost IS (Budget) report, you can quickly estimate how much additional budget your campaign will need to capture 100% SOV.

Lost IS (Rank) – Gives insight into how many impressions a campaign lost out on due to its overall Ad rank, or position on the search results page. Obviously, if my average rank on a particular campaign is 4.1, the campaign is missing out on all the impressions that come with syndication (ads that show in position 1 – 3). This is extremely useful when performing any bid optimizations as it shows the correlation between your current rank and overall traffic.

Exact Match (IS) – This report gives the impression share of a campaign as if all keywords were set to Exact Match. Since keyword match type greatly affects the number of possible impressions (i.e. Broad Match will have the most possible impression, followed by Phrase Match, and lastly Exact Match), the Exact Match (IS) report is an important tool when considering changing the Match settings on your campaign. A low Exact Match (IS) percentage is a good indication that a campaign needs keyword expansion (since this would mean that a majority of the traffic is coming from a broad match of the existing keywords and not the keywords themselves).

Important Take-aways:

• When you add up a campaign’s Impression Share with its Lost IS (Budget) and Lost IS (Rank) you should always get 100% SOV. This helps determine where the most impressions are being lost, either from Budget or from Rank.

• These reports can also be used to help measure the effects of offline ads on Search. If you know when a particular TV commercial is airing, you can run an Impression Share report for that time and date to see if there was a corresponding spike in search traffic.

• Google’s Impression Share reports are great for optimizations. If my campaign is consistently hitting its Daily cap, I can run an Impression Share report to determine on average how many impressions the campaign is missing out on and how much budget I would need to capture it.

Limitations:

• Currently, Google Impression Share reports can only be run on the campaign or account level. There is no way to see the impression share within a particular ad group or keyword.

• Impression Share reports are only available for active campaigns. If a campaign was paused on 5/22/09, there will be no data for an Impression Share report run for 5/22/09.

Tags: Advertising, AdWords, Google, New York City, Online advertising, Search, Search Engines, Television advertisement

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Google: AdWords, Search: How-To, SEM: Ad Creative, SEM: Paid Search, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.