Google Ads (AdWords) Exact Match Impression Share Vs. Exact Match Type

For novices in paid advertising, it’s tempting to invest more of your budget with exact matches. Once you acquire a deeper understanding of how paid advertising works, you may feel more confident in experimenting.

In this article, we’ll discover more about the benefits of AdWords exact match and exact match impression share, and find out the perfect balance of keyword match types to optimize your campaign.

What is Exact Match Type?

Using Exact Match type keywords is the most effective way of matching with user search queries. Let’s say you bid on the exact match ‘cycles for sale’. Your ad will only appear when someone enters ‘cycles for sale’ as a search query. It won’t appear if somebody enters “kids cycles for sale” as it must match exactly.

By using this type, you can display your ads to people who search with your exact keyword, or close variants of it that have the same intent.

Here are two major benefits of exact match type:

• It’s less risky – When compared to other match types (broad, modified broad, and phrase), Exact Match offers the most control and the least risk of attracting irrelevant traffic.
• It saves money – If your keywords attract fewer irrelevant clicks, you aren’t wasting as much money. Instead, the clicks you get are from users who are using precise keywords that align perfectly with your ads.

What is Exact Match Impression Share?

EMIS is the percentage of time when user search queries and your keywords match up exactly.

So, if you bid on the exact match keyword ‘chocolate cake’, your EMIS would be affected as follows:

• For search queries of ‘chocolate cake’, your ad will receive an EMIS of 100%.
• For search queries of ‘chocolate vanilla cake’, you will receive 50% EMIS.
• For ‘strawberry vanilla cake’, your EMIS will be zero.

The EMIS metric provides us with an overhead view of the best performing keywords in the campaign, showing us the percentage of impression share our ads receive, and also telling us if we are wasting your budget on irrelevant clicks.

An important thing to realize is that there is no guarantee that a keyword with match type of “exact match” will have a high EMIS.

This is not the case, as EMIS depends on several factors including the max CPC, budget, and competition among others. With that being the case, it is very possible for a keyword with match type of “exact match” to have a low exact match impression share.

Why is Exact Match Impression Share Important?

There are several benefits of exact match impression share, including:

It is a Strength Indicator

A remarkably high impression share for exact match and standard types tells you that you have a strong set of keywords for your target audience. You can use EMIS as a guide to add more negative keywords to help filter irrelevant searches, thus boosting campaign performance.

It Helps Identify Missed Opportunities

A tight budget can restrict the returns of strong campaigns or ad groups. If you use EMIS to determine a strong ad group, you can allocate more funds to generate more conversions.

Why You Don’t Want 100% Exact Match Keywords

Many newbies make the mistake of thinking using only exact match keywords will generate a 100% EMIS, saving all your money. This is a myth, as there is no way of accurately predicting every user search query.

On Google, around 25% of monthly user searches are completely new. So, if you put all your eggs in one basket with 100% exact match keywords, you’ll still miss out on 25% of user searches every month.

A healthy EMIS is around 70-80%. Anything higher indicates too much control with little room for keyword discovery, while anything lower is incurring wasted spend on irrelevant searches.

How Cleaning up Your Search Queries Help

You may already have a high EMIS, but you should always look to improve it by cleaning up your search queries and by adding negative keywords. This helps filter unqualified traffic, so you aren’t wasting money.

By getting into the habit of looking at your search query report once a week, you can find any bad search queries and add them to your campaigns as negative keywords. Furthermore, try using Google’s Keyword Planner to regularly research new negatives.

Exact Match Keywords Should Be Most, But Not All of Your Google Ads Account

As exact match keywords give you more control and are easier on your budget, it’s a smart move to build a healthy account with as many profitable exact match keywords as you can. You can assess the data to see which keywords are triggering your ads.

Aim for around 50-70% of exact match keywords, and then balance the rest of your account with a mix of discovery keywords with different match types. This ensures that you have a solid foundation of control, but you are also opening your scope to capture all the various ways people are searching for your business.

You can use Exact Match Impression Share as a reliable yardstick for keyword control. By working to keep your EMIS metric in the 70-80% bracket, you’ll set your ad campaigns up for a great balance of keyword discovery and control.

If you want to discover the most significant keywords in your campaign, check out our strategy based on the Pareto Principle.

Is your account’s Exact Match Impressions Share (EMIS) performing as expected ? You may run PPCexpo Exact Impression Share Report to evaluate your Google Ads account.

How to Increase Impression Share

Impression share must not be taken for granted. To increase your Impression Share on Google Ads, the first thing is to locate the reason that’s contributing to lost Impressions. You can check that in your impression share rating in ads manager. The next thing you need to do is to focus on improving your ad ranking. You could probably be losing your impression share because your ad rank is low. Low ad ranking can be caused by a low quality score or low bid. Increase your quality score and raise the bids to get the desired results on impression share as not fixing it will affect the exact match impression share too.

Losing impressions is something never to be taken easy. You must dig into the bottom to know what’s causing it. Take a look at your individual keywords. There might be the possibility of having certain high value keywords with not enough bid on it, which might be causing you to lose impressions there. Use Google’s keyword planner to trouble shoot the problem. Another situation can be where you’re losing out your impression on a high converting campaign. That’s simply because of budget constraints. The solution to it is very simple, Increase your budget! Thank us later for being pretty genius!