But how can we tell if we should narrow our focus to money or relevance? All you need is to run a campaign report with Impression Share (IS) data. Google has a definition for IS, but I often explain this term to clients by saying that it’s a precentage that tells you how many times your ads are shown on Google.com to all the users who searched with your keywords. If the IS of your search campaign is 60%, that means only 6 out of the 10 users who searched with the keywords you used in your campaign can see your ads.

Then why the other 4 users cannot see my ads?

The 4 users, i.e. the 40%, cannot see your ads because of either low ad rank or insufficient budget of your campaign. You will find in the report with IS data there are 2 coloumn called “Lost IS (Rank)” and “Lost IS (Budget)”. The concept is simply like this.

Impression Share + Lost IS (Budget) + Lost IS (Rank) = 100%

The Lost IS (Budget) or (Rank) give us a good insights on picking the right approach to start our optimization.

If IS is 60%, Lost IS (Budget) is 0% but Lost IS (Rank) is 40%, that means a poor Ad Rank (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score) is reducing your impression share. Adding more daily budget cannot help bring back your IS. You should then focus on how to improve Ad Rank by either raising CPC or editing your keywords or ad texts to improve QS.

If IS is 60%, Lost IS (Budget) is 40% but Lost IS (Rank) is 0%, that means your campaign is losing impression share due to an insufficient daily budget. Google wants to show your ads because your ad rank is quite OK, but, sorry, your campaign don’t have enough budget to get you more clicks.

Of course, every time before I run a campaign report with IS date, I do long to see 100% IS with 0% Lost IS. But it seldom happens; otherwise, I will lost my job.