Search Lost IS Rank: How to Improve Lost Impression Share?

Struggling to make an impact with your advertising campaign? Many marketers are leaving money on the table, and a lot of them can’t figure out why.

In this article, you can find the valuable insights you need into why your impression share is so low, and you’ll also find out how to improve the situation.

Once you have this knowledge, it can do wonders for the long-term success of your ads.

What is Lost Impression Share?

Lost impression share is a percentage rate, which indicates the amount of time your ads were not displayed when they could have been. There are two key types of lost impression share, which explain why your ads are not displayed:

Search Lost IS (Budget)

If you don’t have a budget to advertise freely, you’re bound to miss out on some opportunities. Having a 50% Search Lost Impression Share in the budget column means your budget is exhausted before the day is over.

Search Lost IS (Rank)

This metric can tell you if you have been outbid, or if your competitors have a better quality score. Ad Rank impacts Lost IS Rank, so if you have a low ranking, your ads may only appear on the second page of search engine results.

How to Improve Lost Impression Share?

The best way to improve Lost IS is to improve Quality Score, which will help in two ways:

1. It reduces the cost-per-click and hence it stretches your budget
2. It improves the competitiveness of the keyword, which in turn improves the Ad rank

Once you have the insights on where you are missing out, you’ll want to make some changes to reduce your losses and capitalize on possible opportunities.

Tweak the Budget

If the campaign is profitable, you may want to increase your budget. But check that it isn’t just one ad group generating profit. In this case, it’s best to move the ad group to a new campaign with its own budget.

If increasing the budget isn’t possible, consider the following strategies:

• Ensure your profitable campaigns aren’t capped by the budget
• Geo-targeting
• Ad scheduling
• Add negative keywords to filter out unqualified traffic
• Review Google Trends to gain deeper insights on specific terms relevant to your target market

Reduce Lost IS by developing a Higher Ad Ranking

The formula to calculate Ad Rank incorporates several key elements, including Ad extensions and quality score, as well as some factors that Google doesn’t share. If you want to improve your Ad rank, try focusing on these individual aspects.

By working on developing a higher quality score, and optimizing your ad extensions and bids, you can influence Ad rank over time, which ultimately will help reduce your lost impression share.

It’s crucial to keep a finger on the pulse of your ad campaigns. A low impression share is a warning sign, indicating your ads aren’t fulfilling their potential for one reason or another. It could be a restrictive budget, or it may be down to poor ranking factors.

In any case, it’s usually something you can control. By taking action to optimize your budget, keywords and extensions, you can improve a poor lost impression share. With some fine-tuning, you’ll soon have your ads appearing more often, and can enjoy more conversions and revenue as a result.

Ultimately, knowing where your ads stand with this key metric gives you the potential to turn a failing campaign into a successful one. Are you getting enough Impression Share in your PPC account? Run PPCexpo Impression Share Report today to evaluate what you are missing in your account.