Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

The Google AdWords Impression Share Report shares valuable reporting statistics.  

What is Impression Share?

Impression Share is the amount your ads are showing as a percentage of the total available impressions. 

Why Should You Care?

It reflects your exposure in your marketplace.

In other words, are your ads showing up as often as they can be?

Understanding your impression share will give you some insight into steps you can take to increase your exposure in your market.

The first key figure is Lost IS (Budget).  This tells you how much traffic you are losing (as a percentage of total impressions) because your budget is too low.  Google automatically stops showing your ad if it will exceed your budget.  You can select whether Google should periodically shows your ad over the day or if they show it constantly until you run out of budget.

If you are losing a lot of traffic due to your budget, you need to make changes and it should depend on your business goals. You could:

• Reduce your bid and position your ad lower
• Decrease the targeted region
• Increase your budget – Only if the conversion rate justifies it!

The other figure to consider is Lost IS (Rank).  This reflects how much impression share you are losing due to poor ranking on the page.  In other words, your Ad Rank, which is the CPC bid x Quality Score, is reducing your impression share.

So, what can you do to solve poor Ad Rank?

• Improve Ad Quality
• Adjust Match Type
• Increase Your Bid (again . . . only if the conversion rate justifies it)

One last figure is the Impression Share Exact Match.  This reflects how a keyword would perform if it were set to Exact match.  This can help you determine if you should consider changing the match type to improve impression share.  If you see that the exact match percentage is significantly higher than the actual impression share, you can safely assume that you should test different match types to improve impression share.

You can read more from Google about the Impression Share Report at Inside AdWords.

More about Kristie

It is important, when managing your PPC advertising accounts that you analyze your top spending keywords.  Here at JumpFly, when I am just checking in on an account, the first thing I do is sort by cost.  The higher the cost of a keyword, an ad group or a campaign, the more attention is warranted.

So one question to ask yourself when looking at these “top spenders” is – Are they also your top sellers?  They should be. 

You should already have a solid understanding of your top selling products or services.  And these items may change seasonally for you.

But you should also pay attention to your top spenders in your PPC advertising campaigns and be sure you are

1. Spending your advertising dollars in the right place and
2. Responding to the market.  If you find that certain terms have escalated in search volume and interest, maybe something needs to change with your product or service offerings.

Another question to consider:  Are your top spending keywords broad match? 

Be careful here.  Remember that broad match at Google AdWords is actually expanded match – Google shows your ad on “relevant” keywords.   While expanded match can be a very productive method to make sure you are showing whenever possible, it can also be difficult to tell what you are spending your ad dollars on.  The search query report is extremely important when you are running on broad match terms.  This report gives you insight into terms that are working well for your campaign and terms that should be excluded.

More about Kristie

Where Are Your Web Customers Coming From?

Google has an interesting new report called the Geographic Performance Report.  You will find it as a new report type you can create in the Report Center.  The Geographic Performance report allows you to view performance data broken down by geographic origin.  Here at JumpFly, we feel this report can occassionally provide some valuable detail.

You can run the report on a Country/Territory level to really see whether or not various countries are peforming at an acceptable level.  For example, if you have a campaign running that has the USA lumped together with Canada, you can run a report that separates out your Canada costs/clicks/conversions from your USA data.  By doing so, you can get some interesting insight into whether or not other countries are truly bringing you the traffic you want, or if they are bringing you traffic at an acceptable cost.

You can also use the Google AdWords Geographic Report to further break down the geographic area into Regions, Metros and even down to the City level.  Let’s say you have the Los Angeles Metro area targeted in your AdWords geographic parameters.  You can dig deeper into that area by utilizing the Geographic Report and see if Beverly Hills is bringing more or better qualified traffic than Anaheim.  Or maybe you’ll discover Huntington Beach is where most of your conversions are coming from.  You could then take this data and tailor your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising ads to speak to that city that is performing the best, or perhaps create a new campaign just for that city with a very tight geographic focus and very specific ad copy that speaks to the residents of that city.

However you want to use it, the Geographic Report can provide some very interesting data for you to take action on, especially if you are a local service provider, or have numerous local brick and mortar locations.

Learn more about Jack

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