Brand awareness is the first crucial step in the marketing funnel. It’s the vital foundation that leads to acquiring more customers.
Your marketing goal is to improve your brand awareness strategy before optimizing your end-funnel metrics, like conversions, conversion rate and conversion value.
Brand awareness impacts how many people know your company and how easy it is for people to recall your business’ offerings. It helps keep your brand on top of customers’ minds.
For any company to be successful, brand awareness is the first step on the journey. It generates new conversions, as well as stimulates return business from past customers.
In PPC marketing, impression is a vital metric. This is the antecedent to clicks and conversions. If you can’t generate impressions, you’ll struggle to get these other crucial metrics.
This blog will explore how to optimize your impression share to increase your market presence in 2023 also interact with a PPC Signal tool which can help you analyzing your PPC data in one step ahead.
Impressions are a critical PPC metric that measures brand awareness. That said, there are several ways to measure your impressions, including impression share, impression loss and more.
This section will define these metrics and how they apply to brand awareness.
For search ads, impressions are essentially ad views. They account for every time your ad appears on a search results page.
This is the foundation for your advertising brand awareness. Google’s definition of an impression is as follows:
How often your ad is shown. An impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a result page or other site on the Google Network.
Expressed as a percentage, impression share is the number of impressions your ads received compared to how many impressions your ads were eligible for, but did not receive.
Reasons why your ad may be eligible for an impression, but not receive it include:
When your impression share is low, it could signal a problem with one of these factors. You may not be bidding enough or there is another issue causing you to lose potential impressions.
The impression lost category looks deeper at why you didn’t secure certain eligible impressions. You can often find it expressed as either rank or budget-based impressions lost.
This helps you identify problems with your ad strategies that are contributing to loss of impressions.
For example, a 20% mark for impression lost due to ad rank suggests that a fifth of customers searching for your keywords did not see your ads because of poor ranking.
Alternatively, if it was a 20% in the impression lost due to budget rank, you know that you’ve missed out on several impressions because your budget is too low.
Typically, marketers view a low impression share as a negative. It means you aren’t achieving as many views as your ads could see if your strategies were better developed and financed.
Some Google Ads tools use an “Opportunity” metric that puts a more positive spin on low impression share.
This metric shows how much potential opportunity there is for more impressions.
Using this at the keyword level helps you identify search terms with high value that aren’t being capitalized.
Most marketers think about PPC success in terms of clicks and conversions. It’s an excellent strategy for increasing sales, generating new leads and driving revenue.
That said, it is also a great tool for building brand awareness.
There are certainly times when brand awareness takes precedence over clicks and even sales. People need to know who you are before they are willing to engage and buy.
Brand awareness is vital when you’re a company just starting out or launching a new product idea in an unfamiliar space.
Increasing your brand awareness strategies helps you reach new audiences and familiarize them with your company and products/services.
Brand awareness messages may be the first time these audiences have any interactions with your business, so these strategies must be delivered correctly.
Here are a few ways you can increase your brand awareness strategies:
We touched on basic definitions of impressions, impression share and impression lost in PPC. Let’s take a deeper look into these metrics because they are vital to brand awareness.
Impression share measures the percentage of impressions you’re earning and those that you are not. Thus, it helps you see how much more you could be doing with your ad campaigns.
It’s one of the rare cases of a metric that shows you your current status, as well as how much potential opportunity still exists if you improve your ranking, budget, etc.
In other words, measuring impression share allows you to see where you’re succeeding and where you’re lacking when it comes to garnering attention from audiences.
Let’s look at the factors that play into impression share in greater depth.
If your budget is running low, Google Ads may not show your ads. There isn’t enough money left for your ads to be shown. This can occur at high activity times. You may not anticipate how many clicks your ads will receive and how much budget you actually need.
You need to dig into your budgeting settings to ensure the appropriate amount is allocated to each campaign.
You also have the option between accelerated versus standard budget spending. The standard settings will try and spread your budget evenly throughout the day.
Accelerated, on the other hand, spends your budget as quickly as possible. If you’re having impression share issues, you may want to double-check that you aren’t using accelerated budgeting.
The tighter your net, the easier it is to optimize your impression share. If you’re targeting a broad location or areas with high density, there’s a higher likelihood of competitors.
Plus, your ads will trigger more frequently, which could eat into your budget and cause cost-related issues for your impression share percentage.
To limit these problems, you need to be very strategic with your location targeting. Highlight the areas with the highest potential value and focus your ads on these locations.
This will reduce the number of location-based problems your impression share experiences.
Quality Score is a crucial factor in optimizing your impressions. It is arguably the most critical metric in all of PPC marketing.
Quality Score is a rating that Google applies to your strategies. It suggests how strong or weak your ad experiences are based on CTR, landing page experience, keyword relevance and other factors.
Google cares deeply about the experience of its users, which includes the quality of the ad content they see on the SERPs.
Quality Score is Google’s way of ensuring that exceptional experiences rise to the top. That’s why it is a direct factor in ad ranks. The higher your ratings, the more likely you are to top the ad ranks, even if your bids are lower than competitors with poor quality ratings!
What does this mean for impression share?
If you have a low ad rank, you may miss impressions because there are more relevant, higher-quality ad experiences that Google is prioritizing.
Since Quality Score directly improves your ad rank, it will also increase your impression share.
When there are more competitors in the mix, it creates several problems for your ads and impressions.
More competitors mean you have a higher bid cost for clicks. With a higher CPC, your budget won’t stretch as far, resulting in lost impressions.
You may also run into Quality Score issues, especially if competitors have higher ratings. This will lead to impressions lost due to ad rank.
The factors described in the previous section can all influence your impression share, for better or worse.
Ultimately, they come down to two reasons why impressions are lost: budgeting or ad rank.
To further explain why impression share matters in PPC marketing, it’s crucial to look at what impressions lost due to ad rank and budget mean for your strategies.
The “Lost Impression Share (Budget) metric is a percentage of your impression share lost due to insufficient campaign budget.
It’s measured at the campaign level, which allows you to quickly assess which arm of your PPC strategy has the most budgeting issues.
The fastest way to fix this type of impression share loss is to increase your budget. More budget keeps your ads in circulation and ensures you have enough money for clicks.
Alternatively, you can lower your keyword bids. Cheaper CPC values mean you can afford more clicks. Be careful when taking this strategy because if your bids dip too low, you’ll fall into the impression share lost due to the budget category!
Instead of cutting your bids across the board, you can optimize your keyword selection to improve results.
For instance, you can add negative keywords to exclude less relevant search terms or tighten your match types. These tactics may net you less overall impressions and lead to higher rates of clicks and conversions.
Google users are more inclined to choose one of the results from the top of the page. Securing the top ad ranks can dramatically improve your results. The higher you appear on the page, the more ad engagement.
When you’re losing impression share due to rank, it’s a bigger problem than just losing impressions. It could be negatively impacting your entire PPC marketing strategy!
Impression share lost due to ad rank will occur for two primary reasons: too low bids or too low Quality Scores. That said, campaigns with higher Quality Scores will have lower CPCs. So, by raising these ratings, you solve both problems simultaneously.
Let’s look at the steps to improve Quality Scores in your campaigns:
Improving your Quality Scores will take time; you have to pay close attention to how each change to your strategies impacts your ratings. However, it is one of the best ways to improve your PPC accounts’ overall health.
All of the moving parts, metrics and dimensions create a confusing mess the larger your strategies grow. This causes marketers to hit a wall in their PPC scaling.
The bottom line is you have tons to consider about your PPC campaigns, even if you’re only looking at impressions and other brand awareness metrics.
When you find your account has reached a point where Google Ads’ impression share reports are no longer a viable option, PPC Signal is an excellent solution.
PPC Signal is a PPC optimization tool that uses AI and machine learning algorithms to monitor and analyze your accounts automatically.
For increasing brand awareness strategies, you’ll have real-time alerts on every noteworthy change to impressions, impression share, impression lost, etc.
Plus, you’ll have insights for every other change to your account, which will ultimately grow your PPC strategy overall!
Let’s take a look at how this Google Ads tool works.
When you access PPC Signal, you’ll see your main dashboard. Here, the system will display all of the active signals in your account.
Each active signal represents a change in performance to your account. You’ll notice that each one highlights different campaigns, metrics, device types and other details.
In the above screenshot, there are 33 active signals. That’s not too bad to manage, but what if the number was much larger?
An expansive Google Ads account may have hundreds of active signals, even when working to resolve these alerts daily.
You don’t want to comb through all these signals to get to the ones that matter.
For instance, if you want to increase your brand awareness strategy, you only want to focus on top-funnel metrics.
PPC Signal allows you to filter active signals based on these types of metrics. Here is an example of filtering by impression share:
Suddenly, you only have 3 signals to worry about. Filtering makes it very efficient to optimize your campaign the way that aligns best with your marketing goals.
Let’s take a closer look at one of these PPC alerts and what it says.
There is a lot of information packed into this seemingly simple alert. First, you see the metric is decreasing since a particular date — June 29, 2021.
The signal goes on to tell you the significance of this change. Impression share is currently 82.8%, when it typically holds a 93.8% on average.
Finally, you see the campaign, ad group and keyword involved with this change. This information helps you locate it within your account and make the necessary changes.
Why does this signal matter? Since your impression share has dipped well below your average for the month, it’s worth investigating further. It could be a sign that there is a problem with this specific keyword.
By clicking the blue Explore button, you can see an expanded view of the signal.
There are several noteworthy features in this menu. At the top, you have all of the essential information included earlier, with some extra details.
The Take Action button offers advice on how to resolve the signal. The tool uses its AI brain to recommend the next step that you can take. You can also elect to bookmark the signal to review it later.
You’ll notice that the visualization from earlier is expanded. You can add other metrics to this chart to see how this dip in impression share impacts other areas of the campaign.
You can view this data as a table and export it to use with your spreadsheets or other tools.
These various features help you detect when it makes sense to adjust your strategies to capture more impression share.
To increase your brand awareness strategy, you need to optimize your PPC campaign performance for impressions.
However, optimization is not maximization.
Maximization is trying to secure the most amount of impressions and reaching 100% impression share when possible. This is what Google Ads’ impression share report will lead you to believe is crucial to success.
Optimization is securing the correct impressions and impression shares to achieve the highest returns for your campaigns.
Considering all of the factors that impact impressions and impression share, knowing how to optimize impressions and increase impression share is not straightforward.
It’s not possible to find these answers with manual analysis alone. You need the help of AI-driven automation. You need PPC Signal!
Increasing brand awareness is an essential part of the marketing process, but it usually isn’t the end goal. Most companies want to use PPC marketing to drive revenue and improve their bottom line.
Thus, you don’t want to spend time agonizing over micro-decisions regarding your brand awareness campaigns. PPC Signal makes this process hassle-free and vastly more efficient.
You can improve your entire PPC strategy, brand awareness included, with one solution!
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