Do you want to know how to improve impression share in Google Ads?
There aren’t many marketers who would answer “no” to that question. Impression share is a key factor to consider in pay-per-click advertising, as it tells us how many times our ad has been displayed.
Without impressions, we can’t hope for clicks, leads, and conversions.
In this article, we’ll give you 10 valuable tips to help you improve your Google Ads impression share so that your ads are reaching more of your target audience.
Every time your ad is displayed on the Search Network or Display Network, it registers an impression. In Google Ads, impression share operates at different levels, including the ad group, campaign, and keyword level.
Google reviews ad auctions throughout the day, taking various factors like ad quality into consideration before estimating the impression share for each ad.
Some marketers focus only on their top performing campaigns, but you should review impression share metrics beyond these top performers. After all, impression share is not additive.
Here are ten ways to maximize your ad impression share across all your PPC campaigns.
Better quality ads get more engagement. By focusing on your quality score, you can improve individual aspects of your ads, including the keywords, the copy, and your segmenting.
Soon enough, if you have everything on-point, your ads will generate more impressions, and a higher clickthrough rate (CTR).
Your ads must be relevant to attract qualified traffic. Using broad match type keywords runs the risk of wasting money on irrelevant clicks, however they do earn more impressions than phrase match, and phrase generate more than exact match.
Aim for the optimum balance of match types to get a good impression share and discover new search queries.
But what about all the irrelevant clicks? It’s true that too much emphasis on broad matches will incur wasted spend, but that’s where negative keywords step in to save the day.
By using these as filters, your ads will be displayed for fewer search queries. However, you can actually earn a higher impression share as your ads are only seen by better qualified users.
This is better for ad performance, and so your quality score will benefit, which means your ad rank will increase, thus enabling more impressions at the same cost.
By spending more on keywords, you boost the chances of your ad winning at auctions. This might not be a great long-term strategy unless you have a bottomless pit of money, although it can deliver some short-term results.
Google Ads can’t guarantee that all your impressions will be delivered in a timely fashion. So, by considering this option in your campaign settings, you can speed up the pace.
Doing this will almost certainly ensure you exhaust your daily budget every day. This is of more use to people on tighter budgets, as you can earn more impressions in the parts of the day when more of your target audience is online.
Bidding on target impression share may help you to boost your impression share. Placement targeting allows you to select the placements where you want your ad to appear. There are several placements that your ad may appear in. Google Ads automatically sets your bids to show your ad, based on your placement settings:
By considering how your ad performs in different positions, such as the absolute top position vs. top of the page, you can learn which is the best position for you ad and ROI.
These actionable insights enable you to optimize campaigns so that they are in the best position to attract clicks and conversions. With some tinkering, you can get a clear idea of where your brand terms are triggering your ads the most.
Your ad may be displayed more if it is relevant to local searches in a specific area. By knowing your audience, you can use geo-targeting to market to a certain region. This can help you earn more impressions from a very relevant subsect of users.
Not everyone will be online at the same time, nor will every online shopper be ready to buy at the same time. Once again, a deep knowledge of your target users will allow you to determine the best times to display your ads.
Let’s say your ad isn’t getting a lot of impressions at 9am, but a flurry of clicks is costing you a lot of money. It may be a wise move to day-part (exclude/pause) the campaign at that time. You can adjust the display time to whenever you are likely to generate the maximum number of impressions.
Perhaps you’ve added some extensions such as your phone number or a link to your business website. You should monitor performance on these ad extensions, as it will show you how many clicks and impressions they are getting. Furthermore, it will also tell you how much they cost.
By keeping a close eye on these stats, you can determine if ad extensions are increasing your impression share, or if it’s time to cut your losses.
PPCexpo has developed an Impression Share Report, which provides valuable insights into your ad campaigns. With this report, you can:
Check the report out today to redefine your key advertising strategies, so that your ads generate more impressions, more clicks, and in the end, more conversions.
It’s important to remember that impression share is an estimate of when your ad was competitive in the auctions. Small fluctuations are normal, and you don’t need to respond to every little change.
However, PPC managers should strive for the maximum impression share wherever possible, not only in a few top campaigns, but across all their campaigns. By doing this, you can improve ad performance and quality to create a more successful ad campaign.
We will help your ad reach the right person, at the right time
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