How The New AdWords Interface Can Help Improve Impression Share

Previously, best practice when setting up an AdWords campaign (the majority of the time) was to have all three match types (broad, phrase, exact) present for a keyword within an AdGroup. This allowed each keyword to perform at its best, ensuring that the campaign was receiving the best cost-per-click, Quality Score and average position available for each keyword.

With the introduction of the new AdWords interface, the guessing game is over when it comes to figuring out which match type will perform best for your keyword(s). By using the “Segment by search terms match type” option, AdWords will show which keyword match type variations are resulting in the most clicks and/or impressions, even if the specific match type is not present within the AdGroup.

Ensuring that your AdWords campaigns have the best performing keyword match types is one of the easiest ways to improve the overall Impression Share of an AdWords campaign; this feature within the new AdWords interface is an excellent tool in helping achieve a higher overall Impression Share.

Impression Share

Impression Share is a report available to any AdWords Advertiser within the AdWords report section that will report “the percentage of impressions where your ads are shown out of the total available impressions in the market you are targeting” (overall Impression Share). There are two other Impression Share metrics which are reported on as well:

• Lost IS (Budget) – Your campaign is losing impressions due to an insufficient budget.
• Lost IS (Rank) – This is the percentage of impressions your campaign is losing due to a poor Ad Rank ( cost-per-click bid x Quality Score).

Impression opportunities that are lost to an insufficient budget can’t really be helped unless your client is willing to invest a larger Ad spend into their AdWords campaign. The Impression Share percentage to be focused on improving is the Lost IS (Rank), as this can be negatively affected by irrelevant keywords, poor CPC bids, irrelevant Ad Copy, and poor keyword match types.

Improving Impression Share

There are various ways to improve impression share such as improving ad quality, increasing the campaign budget, increasing CPC bids, or even adjusting regional targeting parameters. However, I’ve found that the easiest way to get immediate results is, of course, adding keyword match types!

Client Example

This client, a privately owned Hotel in the Lower Mainland, had the following Impression Share for the month of June, 2009:

The CPC account was only a few months old at this time, and needed refinements, but was performing quite well considering such a competitive market, with an average all-time conversion rate of over 1.5%.

In July, each AdGroup within the campaign had:

• match types for keywords (if not previously in the campaign), added to each AdGroup.
• Broad keywords that had a higher cost-per-click then its’ phrase or exact match counter-parts were removed from the account entirely to help decrease the overall cost-per-click.
• Keywords that had QS (Quality Scores) lower than 7 were deleted.

After these initial changes were made, with a focus on improving match types, July’s Overall Impression Share increased from 23% total market share to 35%. The Lost IS(Rank) had improved from 63% to 61%.

(The top row is a Content Network campaign, which does not report Impression Share).

In August, further changes were made to match types, and this time, Ads were revised to reflect the new match type additions. To date in August, the Impression Share for this campaign has experienced the following improvements:

From the first changes, to current, Overall Impression Share for this client has increased from a total of 23% total market share, to 56%. The client now has a Lost IS(Rank) of 37%, compared to the 63% previously. With those increases in IS, the average position has also increased from 3.8 to 2.8.

The clients campaign can still use, and is still receiving refinements, however with a focus on Match Types and using the new tools available in the new AdWords interface, one can see how an online advertising campaign in AdWords can be greatly improved. For more information about our Cost-per-Click advertising services, and how we can help you improve your online campaigns, contact 6S.