How to Improve Google Ads Impression Share & Get More Conversions

In this video, I'm going to break down impression share metrics, what they are, how to find them in your account, and how to analyze what those numbers actually mean to ultimately be used to make you more money in your account. Let's dive in. All right, so I'm in an actual account, and in this account you can see I have Search Impression Share, Search top impression Share, Search absolute top impression share. And then we have Search lost impression share due to rank, Search lost impression share due to budget. Now you can get this in your account by going to your columns. You hit modify columns and then you come down to competitive metrics. Now there's a few more here, so I'm going to actually add those. We're going to have search loss, top impression share rank, absolute rank, and then search loss, rank budget, lost top budget, here, here. Boom. We're good. So there's actually quite a few here. I'll show you the main ones you're going to want to look at when you're actually analyzing your account. So let's go one by one real quick. What is search Impression share? So Search impression share is the impressions you've received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. Okay, so if there's just for simple math here, if there were a hundred impressions available and you had 80 impressions, that means you had an 80% impression share. So very simple in regards to that. Then we have Search top impression share. So this is Search top impression share is the impressions you received among the top ads on the search results page divided by the estimated number of impressions you are eligible to receive among among the top ads. So use this to bid on top of page location. Don't worry too much about that. And then again, top ads are generally above organic results, although they may be shown below the top organic results on certain queries. So this is just saying how often you are eligible to show in the top ad spots and what percent you received of that. Okay. Then to go even further, you have search absolute top impression share. And this is the percentage of your search ad impressions that are shown in the most prominent search position. That just means back in the day used to have actual ad positions. That would mean ad number one. You are the ultimate winner of the monopoly page of a Google search page for search with the first ad that is shown, which would they just kind of label as the most prominent search position. And, and so absolute top impression share just equals absolute top impressions divided by total eligible top impressions. Okay, so this is, this is going to show you then how, how often your number or basically the number one ad on there. Then we have these lost metrics which are very vital. So we have search lost impression share due to rank. So this is how many impressions did you actually lose because of rank? And rank is going to be your, like your ad rank within the auction itself. Okay, then we have how much did you lose Top impression share due to rank. So we just went through what top impression share means. This is just how much you're actually losing because of your rank. Then we have budget. So how much Search lost impression share budget. This is what you lost simply due to your budget. So you're constrained by budget and this is what you're losing because of that. So that's search lost impression share budget. Then it goes further with search lost top impression share budget, absolute top impression share budget. Then you have a search exact match impression share here as well. Search exact match Impression share is the exact match impressions you receive divided by the estimated number of exact match impressions you are eligible to receive on Google. Exact match impressions are those that match your keywords match exactly. So this would definitely be more in regards to your exact match keywords in your search campaign. So what does all of this mean and how do you actually look at it? What does that even mean? So I went one by one and gave you obviously brief definitions of these, but what does this mean and how do we use this to our advantage? Right, okay. So when I'm looking at an account and I'm inside of an account right now, so I'm actually going to analyze this now, they're actually not getting a lot of impression share and I'm going to show you why. And then I'm also going to show you how they could make more money just by using these metrics and then proper budget allocation. So if we look at search impression share and these campaigns are going to be blurred out, but basically I'm looking at four different search campaigns that are running. If I look at their search impression share here, you're at 12% and then this one's at 12% as well. Then if we look at and then the other's less than 10% and this one's 15%. So they have like very little exposure in the marketplace for the keywords they're bidding on for search ads. Okay. And so this is like, wow, you guys are barely scratching the surface essentially. Right. And again, I'll talk to you here in a bit on how to make money from all of this, but this is very small, high impression share. People ask what is a good impression share? Well, here's the thing, number one, I never operate in an account on an impression share metric unless it's brand. Like if it's a brand campaign, brand campaign being your own business name, then there I'm like trying to maximize impression share with non brand search campaigns like this where I'm just trying to get, you know, new customer acquisition. I don't, I'm not operating my new customer acquisition based off impression share. I'm operating it based on, based off of can I get sales that are profitable for my business goals. That's how I'm looking at it. Right? So I don't operate it based off of any sort of vanity metric or a search impression metric, but I use these search impression metrics as a guide as to my optimizations that I that could be made and as a guide to potential forecasting the growth of an account or forecasting am I spending too much on specific terms and actually optimizing based off that as well. So here if I were talking to this client, you know, I'm like, you've got four search campaigns, they're all getting very little search impression share. And then it's like, so why are we getting very little search impression share number one? None of them are really showing in the top impression share spot. So they're never, their search ads are less than 10% in the top spots and less than 10% ever in the absolute top impression share, which again is like position number one. So they're not very competitive right now in the marketplace for the keywords that they're bidding on. Now if I look at rank, they're losing 30. So remember this one has a 12% impression share. They're losing 31% because of rank. They're losing. And then I have to go over to budget, they're losing 57% due to budget. Okay, how do, how do I analyze rank and how do I analyze budget? Budget is simply, they are capped by budget. So they're literally limited by budget here. So there's Google is saying you could get 57% more impressions if you just increased your budget in order to actually show in those auctions like right now, like so this campaign has a, I think it's pretty small, a $20 per day budget on there. So Google's saying, hey, if you did nothing else but increase your budget, you could actually increase your impression share by 57%. Now you're still going to lose 36% right now. Sorry, 31% due to rank. And rank I'll talk about here in a second. But you can literally get, you're getting 12 now and then you can get, you know, 57 here. So you can get pretty much almost 70% of the impressions just by increasing your budget. And a good impression share for an account is going to be again, it doesn't, I don't bid towards it, but a good impression share like for a healthy mature account is 70 to 80%. Usually if you're like 90% you're like killing it and you dominate right when you're in the 70, 80% and you're hitting your goals, a lot of times what people find in that scenario is they try to go reach to get to 90 and they just see this diminishing return. In a lot of cases it does, it's not worth hitting 90. So when you see 70 to 80% and you're hitting your goals on search campaigns, that's a very, very healthy, really good, high performing search impression share. You have really good coverage of the marketplace at that point. And again, trying to reach to get to 90 usually isn't worth it for the diminishing return that you get from that 12% though is garbage. And here's why. This account for the time frame that I have, which is basically this month, this campaign is hitting a 1000% return on ad spend. Then if I look below, you know, you're still getting, they're actually still getting decent return on ad spends. Other than this one's about a 2, but they're getting about a 4 on 1 and a 3.55. This one though, this campaign has a thousand percent return on ad spend and they are missing out on pretty much 90% of the impressions due to rank. And then they're missing out on 57% of them just due to budget. So what I would tell this client is or prospect is like, hey, literally start increasing budget. You're killing it at a thousand percent. If nothing else changes, you're going to get a lift in this campaign immediately just by lifting budget. Now as you scale budget a lot of times you do start to see fluctuations in like average CPC and stuff. But this is like a campaign that is prime to print money. It's already getting a very high roas and it literally just needs more gasoline. Gasoline equal money right now let's take an example. What if budget wasn't the issue and they're losing due to ad rank? How or sorry, due to rank. How do you fix that rank? You have to go into look at the keyword quality scores right so in this case, I'm going to hop in here and actually look at quality scores again. All of this is going to be. The ad group will be blurred out, the keywords will be blurred out. I'm sorry, I can't show you that. But I can show you this right here. Quality scores are pretty good for them. They're at tens, eights and sevens. If these were like fives or below, they would have a quality score issue right now. How do you fix quality score? I have guides on that but. And I know we have them on our blog post. I don't know if I've ever done a full video on quality score, but it gets murky. But really, quality score, it's like, is your landing page relevant to the keywords you're advertising on? Is your landing page fast? Do you have quick speeds on your like page speed is significant to the performance and quality scores that you get. From what we have seen now, page speeds a lot of times are hard to optimize because it's. Developers have to get involved there. But like, are your page speeds fast? Do you have all the ad assets added? Right. So are utilizing everything you can and in ad assets I have, you know, a video on all of that. But, but in ad in there you would go into your actual ads and then there you can actually go into assets here and we can add different assets. So you have like the images and logos, site links, headlines, call outs, structured snippets, calls, yada yada. Right. So there's a whole list. Again, I have a full video on ad assets. They used to be called extensions if you want to go check that out. But basically are you adding all of the ad assets you can, you have high performing ad copy. Like are you getting really good click through rates here? Look, look at the click through rates we're getting. We're getting a 10% click through rate. That's like crazy, right? By the way, all of these are phrase and exact match keywords. When you add broad, sometimes broad can skew this data a little bit on the search impression share because broad's like almost like tapping into infinity. So usually when you look at impression share, if you have a ton of broad keywords, you're rarely going to see high impression share metrics there. In this campaign I'm looking at a lot of phrase and exact match keywords. And again these all have a really good quality scores. So if you have good quality scores, high performing landing pages that match the intent of the keywords that you're actually adding to your ad group, your ad copy strong and you're actually getting really good click through rates there. And you have all the ad assets in place, right? You got lots of negative keywords added. You're like, I don't know how else I could make this better. Right? I've done a lot of these optimizations. My quality scores are good. Why is my ad rank down? It literally is your bid then that's it. So it's your, it's your bid. And so, so for this campaign, I'm looking at really strong metrics here for quality scores. I'm looking at really strong setup with the ad groups. I'm looking at pretty good ad copy with high click through rates. Their landing pages are fine and they're utilizing all the ad assets and there's negative keywords added. This is like best practice ran. Okay then to me that is, hey, your bids, basically you're losing out because you're not bidding high enough to get this additional 30% due to rank. That's all that means now you could say, well, I can't go bid higher because I can't have less efficiency. I have to operate at a certain percent. Right, for your goals, that's fine. Just know you're losing 30% to the market on those keywords because you're not as aggressive than as some of those other competitors that are able to actually get that additional 30. Right. So that's how you look at rank. Now in this case, they're hitting a thousand percent return. So I'm like literally in this, this campaign, all you have to do is like, hey, let's start increasing budget first. Then don't even. You don't have to change your bidding at all. Right? Let's start increasing budget. Let's get this to the point where budget is no longer an issue for lost impression share. And I have many, many campaigns where I have 0% due to lost search impression share due to budget because there is no budget constraints, right? So let's get you to a place where we're now at 0%. Now I am not saying come in here and launch the budget to a hundred dollars a day right away. I would probably go 20 to like $50 a day. Let that run for a few days, see what the data shows. If everything looks pretty good, we go to like 50 to maybe 80 or 50 to 75. Do that for a few days. See, things are good. We work in increments there, right? But ultimately I'm just pouring gasoline on something that's working really well. Then Once I maximize that out, I'm now looking at ad rank. And if I'm still, let's say I start spending 100, 120, $150 per day, whatever I'm able to spend and still hit and have a 0% loss due to budget. Now I'm like basically getting everything I can for my budget. So this search Lost is at 0%. Now if I'm still losing 35% due to rank, then I would be consulting with this company and say, hey, if you guys are still hitting 1,000% return, you know, if we can go get an additional 30% of impressions and you can operate this at a lower roas. And so we'd have to start a testing phase here. You know, you ultimately could go make more money because now we're going to bring in more sales. And yes, it might be a lower efficiency, but you're getting a stupid high return on ad spend. By the way, benchmark roas for an E commerce business, which this is an E commerce business, is like 300% row as. So they're getting, you know, 3x that. And so I'd be benchmarking towards that if I was having that discussion with them. Now I just showed you how to analyze all of those metrics and I just showed you how I'm looking at it in order to help improve that campaign. And I just showed you how we could make that campaign increase just by budget. And then basically we could then make a decision to increase by bids bidding more to get the additional 30% as long as our performance is still strong there at that, at that moment. Right. But here's the other thing. Let's say I didn't even do that analysis. Let's say I just came in here and simply looked at these four campaigns. They're all set to $20 per day budgets, by the way. This is actually set to 50. So it's a bit different, but it's like actually the least performing. So this one though, I would immediately analyze this. I would say, all right, why are you spending $20 per day, which is not really scratching the surface for those keyw based off your 10% impression shares you're getting. Right. Why are you spreading your budget so thin across four different campaigns? That doesn't make any sense. And here's why it doesn't make any sense. This campaign is getting the same impression share as your other campaigns and you're, you're making a 1000% return and the others are getting less than 400%. Why on earth. Would you continue to spend 20 per day on those other campaigns and not literally just pour your full budget then into this campaign and start maximizing it? Now? They could come back with a reason that might make sense, but in most cases they're like, oh, we don't know. Right. We were just trying to like have exposure on all of these different type of, you know, keywords. Right. That's in this case. If you want to just go print more money right away, I literally would just like forget these campaigns right now. We'll come back to them later when you have more money. By the way, how are you going to get more money? You're going to get more money by pouring that budget into this campaign. We're now going to get that impression share up. Right? So instead of 12% impression share, we're going to start getting more from this loss that we have from budget, which equals more sales for us. We're going to get more sales just by giving this campaign more budget. With those more sales, you're already at a thousand percent roas. So if all things are still equal, we can expect very similar performance. Sometimes you're going to get a little diminishing return as you scale, but in this case they won't because they're at $20 per day. If I can get them to $60 per day. And we're probably going to get very similar performance performance out of this. Right. So now I just increased your sales significantly and I'm not doing that just based off roas. All this case is clear as day with roas. That's why I wanted to show you guys this account. Technically, the conversion rate's a bit lower than the campaign below it at 2. Right. And the other one's getting about a 2. This is 1.68. What, what am I looking at though? I'm looking at a few other things. Value by conversion. This is $419 in revenue per conversion. They're getting a 230 below that and a 284 below that. Right. This is fat. Okay, so you're getting way more value per. Your AOV is way higher here. And so yes, you are at a tad lower conversion rate, but it's not too far off. And you're getting a CPA of $39 right now compared to 60 and 80. Okay, forget this campaign at the bottom. Don't even worry about those metrics. So I'm comparing a $39 CPA to a 60 and an 80. And I'm getting out of that a 1.68 conversion rate, not a 2, not a 1.8. So conversion rate is lower but I am actually converting at a lower CPA a higher ROAS and I'm getting almost double the value per conversion. This is where you make more money right now. This is where you spend the budget and then you come back later as you made more money and now hopefully you have more budget to spend and then you come back to try to get these campaigns to work. But for now it does not make sense to take basically $80 per day. Again, 20, 20, 2020. It does not make sense to have $80 per day dispersed amongst four different campaigns that are all subpar search impression shares right now. And one has 3x the actual performance in regards to return on ad spend and and the others are 3, 8, 35 and a 2 compared to a thousand percent return on ad spend and they have double or they have less than half or about half the AOV per conversion. The value per conversion is about half other than the one at the bottom. But again, don't worry too much about that compared to our top performing campaign. That is how you take this analysis and you go make more money. So if this company just took that advice, they would increase their sales right away and they would not really be sacrificing much of efficiency at the stage that they're in. So here they simply have an issue of budget allocation and I see this all the time. And using the search impression metrics is how I actually articulate this story to this prospect. And once you do that, once you understand these metrics and then you can articulate that back to a prospect or a client, the light bulb moment usually happens. Again, some companies may not have a clue what any of this means. They're just like, oh well we wanted to spend $20 per day on this product and $20 per day on this service and that's why we have our budget split out like that. And you're like, well here's why that doesn't make sense. You have basically a winner here and losers here. So let's just maximize our winner right now. That simple. There you go. You now know how to analyze impression share metrics, hopefully to ultimately make more money inside of your account. If you want to upgrade your Google Ads, if you're running ads and you want to learn more and you want more access to me, I do a weekly Q and A and I have course material in our community called PPC Copilot. Go check that out. That will be in the description below. I would love to see you inside. Or if you're spending money on ads. If let's say you're five $10,000 plus per month on ads and you're like, I don't want to learn anymore. I just need an expert to come in here and help me, then we offer a free Google Ads Offer audit. If you qualify, the link to go get that free audit will be in the description below. My team will do a full breakdown of your account, and they're going to give you a practical roadmap to help increase whatever your goal is if we think we can actually help. So again, totally free. If you qualify, the free audit link will be in the description below. And if you don't want any of that, that's cool too. I'll see you on the next video. Sam.