Explaining WHAT search impression share is—and how it effects a your business.
To sum this up fairly stylishly, Search Impression Share on the Google Ads platform, basically means, how often your ads are showing during a given auction, it is closely associated to your budget, since depending on how much daily spend one has indicates to Google how many times your ads can show.
Here is how Google sums it up:
Impression share (IS) is the percentage of impressions that your ads receive compared to the total number of impressions that your ads could get.
Impression share = impressions / total eligible impressions
Eligible impressions are estimated using many factors, including targeting settings, approval statuses, and quality.
It’s a really useful way to understand whether your ads might reach more people if you increase your bid or budget.
I like keeping things nice and simple, so let’s use some good old base ten numbers. Let’s say that you own ABC company and wanted to advertise on Google. Let’s also (hypothetically of course) say you have $50 to spend per day (daily budget.).
That would mean if your average cost per click was $5 you basically have 10 clicks per day, but hold on, because now this is where Search Impression Share comes into play. See…Google will place your ad accordingly during that particular auction and the likelihood of your ad showing in the top results is expressed as a percentage.
That percentage which is closely related to your keyword bid is Search Impression Share, as if Google could complicate bidding a little bit more, there is actually a percentage or likelihood of your ads being shown in the Search Top Impression Share and even a percentage expressing how often your “absolute” or Search Abs. Impress Share.
Conclusion:
If you have not realized this already, Google really really REALLY likes using statistics to validate how complex and awesome their system actually is!
All jokes aside, it’s a very useful and important metric to making sure your campaign achieves the results that impact your business directly.
I hope this provides some light on what exactly search impression share “IS”. If you want to talk about this further or have any questions please feel free to reach out. I’m always happy to provide insights on Google Ads, or if you just want to talk about how awesome the movie There Will Be Blood… is, I’m literally a few clicks away.
