AdWords Search and Display Networks Will Soon Get Impression Share Metrics

Google will soon offer impressions share metrics for its search and display networks – a long awaited addition. Impression share is the percentage of impressions you received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. This could be based on your targeting settings, approval statuses, bids, or quality scores.

Once released, you can use ad group impression share data to identify ad groups that aren’t getting all of the available impressions. By knowing what impressions you aren’t getting you can improve your campaign and take advantage of all possible impressions.

Over the coming weeks, you’ll see three new columns in AdWords that can be added to your ad groups tab:

• Impression Share: This is a percentage of impressions you received divided by the impressions that you were eligible to receive.
• Lost IS (Rank): This is the share of lost impressions due to Ad Rank. This won’t be shown if you were near your budget constraint for the day.
• Exact Match IS: Measures the percentage of impressions you received for searches that exactly matched your keyword divided by the estimated number of exact match impressions you were eligible to receive. This is only for the Search Network.

Google is working on several different performance metrics for its advertisers. Over the past couple months Google has made changed to allow top-of-page estimates, additional Google product ads, and ads below search results. The most recent updates in their algorithms would provide better impression share metrics that help to improve visibility. By expanding what you can see they feel they can help advertisers know much better what is going on behind the scenes of their account. Google also helps to improve impression share metrics by allowing:

• Refined campaign-level statistics: Google is backdating this data until so you can dive back into your data and see historical impression share metrics. This will allow you to see percentage one impressions received divided by impressions you were eligible for clear back to May 2011. If you want pre-May 2011, you’ll have to contact Google.
• Once-a-day updates: To ensure that your data is accurate, impression share metrics will be updated once per day, around noon PT. This data will show the previous day, depending on where you’re located in the world. If you’re in the U.S., it will show the previous day; if you’re located outside the U.S., it may not include the all the previous days data.

All of these changes are expected to roll out to all advertisers globally on January 30.