If you run Google Ads, either on your own or with a partner like us, you’ve likely come across terms that make you go, “Hm. What does that mean, and why should I care?”
Our goal with this article is to demystify one of those terms: impression share. What is it, where can you find it, and what can it tell you about your senior living Google Ads? Let’s dig in.
Executive Summary: What Does Impression Share Really Mean in Google Ads?
- Impression share helps you compare how often you show up against your strongest competitors for the keywords, audiences, and geographies you’re targeting.
- The formula: Impressions earned / impressions for which you were eligible = impression share.
- Impression share helps provide context about a campaign, the competition level in its market, and a rough estimate of how much your competitors are spending.
- Impression share is not a goal metric for campaigns since it isn’t tied to an outcome, like move-ins or lead generation.
- Budget, budget limits, quality score, bid competitiveness (higher is stronger), excessively narrow targeting, and ad rank impact impression share.
- Impression share can help explain why a campaign may see changes in total impressions from one time period to the next.
- It’s still possible to earn leads with an impression share lower than a competitor.
Table of Contents
What Is Impression Share in Google Ads?
How Is Impression Share Calculated?
What Impacts Impression Share?
Should You Stress Over Impression Share? How Important Is It?
What Is Impression Share in Google Ads?
Simply put, impression share is a percentage that indicates how many times people saw your Google Ads compared to how many times they could have seen them. This is primarily impacted by the budget you’re willing to spend and how much your competitors are spending on the same keywords, audiences, or geographies.
You can find your impression share in your main Google Ads campaign reports (by adding the Impression Share column) as well as in the Auction Insights tool.
How is Impression Share Calculated?
The formula for impression share is impressions earned divided by the impressions you were eligible for. So, doing some simple napkin math: If you earned 500 impressions, but you were eligible for 1000 impressions, your impression share would be 50%.
500 Impressions Received / 1000 Eligible Impressions = 50% Impression Share
In this example, your ad appeared 500 times, but you missed out on another 500 times when someone searched for your keywords and your ad was eligible to compete.
What Impacts Impression Share?
Here’s what can impact impression share:
- Budget: You have a daily budget for your ads. Once it’s gone, Google will stop showing your ads. So, for example, if you’ve exhausted your daily budget by noon, your ads will stop showing. What happens to all the searches that happen after 12 pm? Competitor ads will show up. And the bigger their budgets, the more likely it is their ads will show up.
- Ad Rank: Ad Rank is a score Google gives your ad based on your bid amount and how strong of a connection it can make between your ad and its landing page. For example, if your ad is about assisted living but the landing page primarily focuses on memory care, there will be a disconnect (and Google will notice).
- Quality Score: Quality Score is a 1-10 scale that shows how strongly your ad targeting, ad assets, and landing page align.
- Bid Competitiveness: This isn’t a metric, but the rule of thumb is that a higher bid makes you more competitive. In Google Ads, higher spend makes you a stronger presence.
- Narrow Targeting: Targeting a very, very small area can limit eligible impressions to only a handful while other competitors are still targeting that same area. That means you’re fighting for a smaller opportunity while your competitors continue to spend heavily against you. Narrow targeting works best when you have a truly narrow niche that requires it.
- Budget Limits: A low daily spend limit can severely hamper a campaign’s ability to show impressions, especially as cost per click continues to rise for many campaigns. If your campaign has a daily limit of $20 and its average cost per click is $10, you can earn only two total clicks per day. Once those are used, Google Ads will consider your ads much less favorably than competitors willing to spend more.
To improve your impression share, consider increasing your budget and better aligning ad assets with the landing page (especially the wording in your titles and headings).
Should You Stress Over Impression Share? How Important Is It?
Impression share provides helpful circumstantial information. If your impressions suddenly drop in Google Ads, reviewing impression share can help you understand why. But impression share isn’t the be-all, end-all metric for gauging a campaign’s performance. Here are five better metrics for evaluating your Google Ads performance.
It’s also important to note that you can still succeed in earning leads with an impression share that’s lower than a competitor.
Need Help Getting the Most Out of Your Paid Ads?
Our paid ads team lives, eats, and breathes Google Ads. Plus, they have a deep understanding of (and appreciation for) senior living. Get in touch and let’s have a conversation about paid ads.
