the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

Last week the Adwords blog highlighted another reporting innovation that really has a lot of potential. Not as groundbreaking to me as the placement performance reports, but certainly something worth taking note of.

Impression share is what Adwords is calling their reports that allow the advertiser to guage how much of the available market they are reaching. Here are the 3 columns that represent this measurement:

Impression Share (IS): The percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting. This metric is available at the campaign and account level for search.

Lost IS (Rank): The percentage of impressions lost due to low Ad Rank (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score).

Lost IS (Budget): The percentage of impressions lost due to budget constraints.

This information will be useful to both advertisers as well as the PPC campaign managers. Why?

Advertisers:

Very simply, you can now estimate the share of impressions that you are reaching, and more importantly, how much farther you can scale your product reach.

Also, the Lost IS data will tell you whether you are missing impressions due to budget or Ad Rank. If you are losing share to Ad Rank you need to:

1- re-evaluate your ad copy
2- re-evaluate your landing page
3- examine overall quality score per adgroup and keyword,
4- also talk to your PPC campaign manager. “why are we in this predicament?” if they can’t give you a clear answer as to how they will address this, you should be concerned.

Your goal should be to never lose impressions because of Ad Rank, only budget. Why? Because once you optimize the campaign to the point where you are achieving the desired ROI you will want to go ahead and increase the budget as high as you can possibly afford. If your Ad Rank is poor, it doesn’t matter that you’re ready to spend more, you won’t be able to (efficiently).

Campaign Managers:

This report can be your best friend, assuming you’ve got the campaign configured correctly and firing on all cylinders. It’s often been difficult to estimate the available market share that a client was not reaching due to budgeting constraints. In fact, I would say it was completely impossible to do so accurately. This may be oversimplifying things a bit, but you can now run a report for a client that very clearly indicates that they are missing XX% of the market, and therefore should consider increasing their budget accordingly. This is especially valuable to larger brands who are not necessarily concerned as much with direct response variables, but more with campaign reach.