If you are struggling to report on search impression share for Google Ads, this guide is for you. We will cover what search impression share is, how it’s used, why it’s valuable to track, and how you can best report on it outside of the Google Ads user interface.
We will also delve into how Funnel does some clever work to make impression share-related metrics easier to work, and how you can visualize the output in Dashboards, Looker Studio, Google Sheets, a data warehouse, or any other of the export options that Funnel offers.
Without further ado, let’s get started!
What is search impression share?
Search impression share is a metric that informs you how search ads are performing relative to competitors that are bidding for the same keywords and theoretically ranges from 0 to 100 percent. It shows the percentage of impressions your ads got compared to the number of impressions your ads were eligible to get. The calculation looks like this:
Impression share = impressions / total eligible impressions
There are two reasons why your impressions are lower than the total eligible impressions, and they are both core concepts in Google Ads auction format: budget and rank.
Budget means that your daily budget has been reached, and if you would have allocated a higher budget, you may have achieved additional impressions. Rank means that you did not win the auction, because your ad rank was too low and a certain percent of impressions were lost (read more about all six factors that go into ad rank here).
Why is it important to keep track of search impression share?
Unlike metrics such as costs and revenue, where exact figures are key, search impression share provides a general idea of the minimum and maximum capacity of a certain campaign and keyword. Without it, you can be easily fooled into thinking there are endless potential impressions if you just improve your ads and/or improve your ad rank. Worst case, it can lead to massive waste where more and more budget or time is poured into a campaign where the maximum potential is close to (or has already) being reached.
It’s also an important metric to track to see if and how the dynamic is changing in the auction for a certain keyword.
Maybe a new competitor has started putting large budgets into certain auctions, which lowers your impression share. Or an old competitor has decreased their bidding, which gives you a higher share. This would not be possible to track by looking at the standard Google Ads reports alone where search impression share offers a great additional tool.
What search impression share should I aim for?
It would be great to be able to give a definitive answer to this question, but the honest answer is that it depends. For instance, if you compete for highly competitive or broad keywords, target brand / competitor keywords, or operate with a limited budget, it’s unrealistic to aim for a very high search impression share. Instead, you identify your baseline by setting up proper tracking for search impression share across your campaigns and target the opportunities that you find.
Why is Search Impression Share generally difficult to report on?
Reporting on search impression share outside of the Google Ads interface can be tricky. This is because the metric is delivered as a percentage value as opposed to an integer, which means that it’s not aggregatable. In addition, when the search impression share is lower than 10 percent or higher than 90 percent you do not get an exact figure via the API. Instead, you get “ less than 9.99 percent” or “ greater than 90 percent." In essence, this means that the Search Impression Share metric you receive in the standard API response is very tricky to work and visualize.
How does Funnel help me report on Search Impression Share?
To make the metric more easy to work with, and give it more utility, Funnel does some clever calculations using the standard API response.
Funnel creates an estimated "Total Eligible Impressions" metric by taking Impressions divided by the Impression Share percentage delivered by the API. For example, if you have 100 impressions and 69% impression share, Funnel creates a third metric called Total Eligible Impressions and populates it with the result of 100 (impressions) / 0.69 (impression share) = 145 (Total Eligible Impressions).
The key benefit of this approach is that we now have a newly created metric (Total Eligible Impressions) that can be used to reverse engineer estimated Search Impression Share metrics:
- Search Impr. share – Estimated
- Search Lost IS (budget) – Estimated
- Search Lost IS (rank) – Estimated
- Search Top IS – Estimated
Even better, Funnel creates Total Eligible Impressions and the above 4 metrics automatically when you connect a Google Ads data source with report level Campaign, Campaign/Ad Group and/or the Search Keyword report type.
Note: If you export data to a data warehouse, you cannot directly export the 4 metrics because they are calculated at the point of aggregation. However, you can use the component metrics (e.g. Impressions and Total Eligible Impressions – Estimated) to make the same calculations in a later stage. If you click on the individual metrics above in Funnel in the Metrics-tab, you can see how they are calculated and use as a blueprint for your own calculated metrics.
Why are the metrics estimated?
As we mentioned in the start of the article, search impression share is a concept where you don’t need the absolute figure. Instead, you should be more focused on monitoring and reacting to long- and short-term trends.
With that in mind, Funnel uses the percentage metrics provided by Google and estimates what the underlying metric to calculate the percentage is. This has a significant advantage when it comes to reporting: The resulting metric can be aggregated and becomes much easier to work with.
To start reporting on search impression share in Funnel, do the following:
Existing Funnel users:
If you have a Google Ads data source already connected (on Campaign, Campaign/Ad group report level and/or Search Keyword report type), you can navigate to the Data Explorer and search for the above metrics in the field picker. Start by including Date as a dimension and you will be able to start exploring the metrics on a time line. Once you've gotten familiar with the metrics, add them to your Dashboards or data exports.
New Funnel users:
1. Create a free Funnel subscription by clicking "Start of free" on Funnel.io
2. Add your Google Ads credentials.
3. Connect using a template or manual configuration. Use report level "Campaign" or "Campaign, Ad Group". Select "Search Keyword" if you only want search related campaigns. Note: If you choose "Search Keyword", all other campaign types will be filtered our from the API response. To get all your campaign types in this data source, choose "Standard" as Report Type.
4. Once the data source is connected Funnel will request 2 years of historical data from the Google Ads API, which will load incrementally from today and backwards. The first few days of data should be available in a few seconds, the full backfill can take a few hours (depending on data volumes).
5. Once the data has started loading, click the three dots next to the data source and select “show in Data Explorer.”
6. Select the metrics you are interested in. You can search for "estimated" in the search field to see a list of the metrics that Funnel has created related to Impression Share. Include "Date" as a dimension if you want to review the metrics on a timeline.
7. You can also add other dimensions to dig deeper into particular campaigns, ad groups or keywords (depending on the level of granularity of the report you selected when connecting the data source).
8. Add the metrics to your Dashboards or data exports
We hope you found this guide regarding reporting on impression share for Google Ads helpful. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to get in touch with our support team or your designated contact at Funnel.