Knowing how your business’ ads are running in comparison to your competitors can be determined with a single metric: Impression Share.
Not only will Google give you the names of the businesses competing against yours, but they will also tell you what percentage of the time their ads show up compared to your business.
What is impression share and how does it affect your business?
Impression share = the number of times your ads showed up divided by the number it was eligible to show up for. What stops you from getting 100% of impressions? There are two major reasons:
Your budget is small: Google conserves your budget throughout the day looking for a conversion. The problem is that unless you are receiving a large number of conversions each month, Google will constantly be "looking" and not showing your ads to dozens or hundreds of potential purchasers.
Your ad quality is low: What your Impression Share Results are telling you is to improve your ad copy so it contains search terms, and to also improve your landing page so it loads quickly and contains search terms as well.
Google provides a breakdown by ad set and keyword of the percentage of impression share lost. This provides greater context, and enables you to work on individual ad copy or turn off an underperforming ad group altogether.
What Does A Low Impression Share Mean?
Having a low impression share means you are losing potential customers. Google tries to conserve your budget so it spends at the best time to get a person to convert, but if your budget is too small Google will limit your ads showing to other likely purchasers hoping it finds that one perfect customer.
If your business is receiving a 25% impression share, which translates to 10 conversions per month, working towards increasing it to 40% should increase your conversions to 16 per month or 60% increase in customers looking to purchase or book.
How To Improve Your Impression Share?
Increase your budget: Spending more means your ads will show for a longer period of time throughout the day, which will lead to more conversions because more people are now seeing your ads.
Improve the quality of your ads: Having a high-quality score for your ads signals to Google that people who see your ad are likely to find what they’re searching for. If your quality score is higher than 5, Google is able to determine that what you're offering is relevant to the customers' search.