There are actually lots of confusions with marketers in understanding Ad Impressions and Impression share. You should first check whether you’re in the right position to check impression share. By trying to increase the campaign’s impression share we cannot assume that our Ad impressions will also increase. This article covers a few tips on how to improve your impression share without losing Ad impressions. Before going to the concept I want you to know about what is ad impression and what is impression share.

What is Ad Impression

An ad impression is a count when your ad is served on search engines or other partner publisher websites/blogs. If you got 100 impressions for a keyword then you can conclude that the respective keyword is triggering 100 ads in a day.

What is Impression Share

“Impression share” is nothing but the number of impressions we received in the particular period divided by the estimated number of impressions which we were eligible to receive in the auction within the same period.

When to improve your Impression Share?!

As I said earlier, First you should determine when to think about checking auction insights features like impression share, average position, Overlap rate, Position above rate, Top of the page rate, Outranking share etc.

STEP: 1 Check whether SEM campaign is performing Better

Check whether you’re getting enough impressions from your campaign. You’ve to think of improving your Impression Share only if your campaign is yielding some good impressions. In any Pay Per Click search campaign, the changes you made today will be functional only after 3-4 days. So if you made any changes then please wait for at least 2 days before measuring its results. To check your campaign performance go to dimensions and click view and select hour of the day. Filter the day to today (make sure you do this at the end of the day) and enable compare previous period option. Next, click the plus (+) symbol for clicks and impression.

Sort the data as per the Hour of the day and observe the results. Compare your campaign performance hour by hour. If there is an increase in all time period then your campaign is actually improving. If your campaign is performing well then you’re on the right track.

How to increase your Ad impressions in Google Adwords/Bing Ads

If your campaign is not performing well, then concentrate on increasing the quality score of your keywords.

1. In order to improve the quality score of your keyword, you have to ensure that bidding is proper. Don’t bid below the first-page bid.
2. Add the keyword which you want perform well in ads by using { symbol i.e. keyword insertion. (as shown in the image) This ensures that your keyword is relevant to your ad script.
3. Finally, add the same keyword phrase in your landing page or final URL.

Complete the above 3 easy steps and you will notice a good quality score. According to me, having a quality score above 7 is good. I will never keep a keyword active which has a quality score lesser than 6. Higher the quality score will cost you less per click.

STEP: 2 Check you’re getting good Conversions

Even though you get good clicks and impressions what matters in end is Conversions. If you’re getting good conversion then it is the best time to check the auction analytics.

How to Improve your impression share?

As I said earlier, impression share is nothing but a number of impressions we received in the particular period divided by the estimated number of impressions which we were eligible to receive in the auction within the same period. For an example, let us consider we got 750 impressions from one campaign in a certain period (Check your campaign performance before starting auction insights and note down the impressions you got) and your impression share is showing 75% then it tells us that lost 250 impressions as your campaign is not completely optimized.

As per the above case, your ad impression is 750 and the actual ad impression is 1000. So 750 divided by 1000 and multiplied by 100 gives your impression share.

To be frank, it just takes 10 minutes to recover low impression share in Google Adwords or Bing Ads. Please read the rest of the article carefully to improve your impression share.

One of the fairways is to increase your campaign budget and keyword bid at the same time. Actually, your budget decides how often an ad needs to be shown, which can increase the percentage of total impressions that your ad shows for. Raising your bids can improve the likelihood that your ad will show for a given ad auction.

Secondly, you can decrease your location targeting reach. For an example, if I’m targeting India as the location, I might think to exclude certain states where I feel there my business cannot be successful. By restricting the location you can see an increase in impression share. But keep in mind that decreasing locational reach may lower down your potential number of impressions available to you.

Let me tell you a secret method which allows you to increase your Impression Share without affecting your available impressions and that too without increasing the bid.

1. Go to Dimension
2. Filter at least 30 days to scrutinize the data.
3. Select view and click User location.
4. In the column, include Region.
5. Now click Impressions

By doing so you could you see what are the states/region your campaign is performing better. Take the top 3 regions with lowest impressions and exclude it in campaign location settings. By doing so your Google Adwords or Bing Ads system will automatically bid more on the areas where demand is high. Exclude regions step by step. After excluding regions, try to observe the campaign performance for at least 7 days. If there are no big changes in the performance then try to exclude the next set of regions which has lower ad impressions.

What happens If I add new regions?

In case, If we increase our regional targets, then we may see a decrease in impression share. Adding a new region brings us more potential impressions available as your account may not be fully optimized there are chances to see a lower impression share in your auction insights report. To avoid this situation, consider increasing your daily budget which will cover the costs.

Last but not the least, let me tell you the secret how to improve your impression share without losing Ad impressions

Go to your Keywords page, Click columns and select modify the column.

Select all 3 options

1. Search impression share
2. Search exact match impression share
3. Search Lost Impression Share (Rank)

and save the column.

Now we are breaking the metrics into keyword level. This might be time-consuming but it is the finest way to improve impression share without a decrease in ad impressions.

Now click the impression to filter keywords based on high ad impression

Now your keywords will be sorted as per the impression share received. Now check the Search exact match impression share column. If it is less than 90% then you have to increase the bid or the quality score of the particular keyword. I used to get 100% for the exact match search impression and I guarantee that you can also achieve the same.

Secondly, check the Search impression share of the particular keyword. Again if it is below 90% then you have to work on either improving the quality score or increase the bid of the keyword.

Don’t expect results overnight. Give AdWords/BingAds minimum 3 days to adapt to the changes we did.

After 3 days, check the auction insights. Now you will observe that you’re cornering your competitor.

If you need a dedicated account manager to improvise your Bing Ads or Google Adwords account then you can Hire marketing experts from Bharat Marketing.

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