Where Do Impressions Come From?

Without eyeballs, all internet marketing campaigns are doomed to fail.  It’s the number of eyeballs that the search engines use to create the most influential reporting metric, impressions.  This is a term that most people often don’t pay any attention to in the online marketing world.  Impressions are the foundation and backbone of every online marketing campaign.  Clicks and conversions are both related to impressions, because without impressions, any campaign will have zero clicks and zero conversions.

What exactly is an impression in Google?  Using a proprietary algorithm, Google offers all advertisers an inventory of available impressions which is based on keywords and groups of keywords searched for on Google.com.  Google then executes its algorithm in order to show the most relative advertisers and websites to that particular user who provides the eyeballs, which is then added to the total inventory in Google.   Google has created a metric based on this available inventory, it’s called Impression Share.  Their definition of impression share is “the percentage of impressions where your ads were shown out of the TOTAL available impressions in the market you were targeting.”

Impression Share is a great method to use in finding campaigns that are not converting very well due to a variety of reasons.  The information retrieved on these impression share reports can help describe what problems exist in a search campaign.  The report also details percentage of exact keyword matches, percentage of missed opportunities due to low rank (low average positions), and lost opportunities because of not enough budget.  All of these metrics can help diagnose an important problem in most paid search campaigns, QUALITY!  Low quality keywords, low quality creatives, and low quality bid management strategies, are important problems that once discovered will help improve the performance of a campaign.

There are many solutions to the lost impression share problem.  Some of those solutions include adding in the additional match types of converting keywords.  New match types, such as phrase and exact match, is one of the best methods of increasing impression share for a campaign.  Other solutions include increasing max bids for converting keywords and raising daily budgets of high volume campaigns.  Running an impression share report and understanding it value, is a great report for not only helping to improve a campaigns performance, but also gain additional market share in the Google sponsored ad space.