Category Archives: Impression Share

A New Way to Look at Impression Share Metrics

Opinions on impression share are mixed. Some marketers love them and others couldn’t pay less attention. But as the impression share metrics in AdWords and adCenter become increasingly accurate, I think they’ll start to become a metric that simply shouldn’t be ignored. But not for the reasons you might expect.

I use impression share not as a metric to judge account success, but to gauge my performance as a manager. Everyone wants their ad to show up in every search that will generate a conversion, but that’s impossible to predict. A manager’s job should be to maximize the amount of impressions with conversions and decrease the number without. Since impression share is the number of impressions you received divided by the number of impressions you were eligible for, you have a built-in metric to help you reach 100% efficiency. Managing for impression share can be done two ways: cutting out the crappy impressions you know won’t convert, and grabbing the the highest percentage of the good ones that can convert.

Cut the Crap:

For every business, there are impressions you simply will not convert on. Get those out of there. As you exclude these bad impressions, the number of eligible impressions decreasing, improving your overall impression share.