In the land of paid search, there are many pieces to the puzzle of setting up a quality campaign. You’ve spent a lot of time planning your keywords and their phrase matching, the organization of ad groups, writing your ad copy and designing the landing page; the list is long!
As a b2b performance agency, BusinessOnline has helped clients comb through the details of planning in preparation of their campaign launch, followed by a question shortly thereafter from the client;
“Why isn’t my ad showing up?!”
Many times, after launching a campaign, someone on another team will try to search for a keyword to trigger their company’s paid search ad and not see it in the results. “Why isn’t our ad showing up?!,” they anxiously ask. You spent all the time building this campaign, you want to be seen.
If your ads aren’t showing up, you have a limited presence in front of the eyes of your audience and prospective customers. No eyes = no clicks = no goals met. Whether the goal of your campaign is brand awareness, lead generation, or ecommerce sales, the campaign is compromised if it’s not above the fold of a search results page.
If your ad isn’t showing up for a search query that fits your keywords and their match types, then you want to evaluate your search impression share (how often it does show up out its qualified opportunities).
On a holistic level, you’ll want to make sure that you avoid common PPC mistakes, but here we’ll focus on those affecting lost impression share.
What is Impression Share?
Per Google, Impression share (IS) is the percentage of impressions that your ads receive compared to the total number of impressions that your ads could get.
Impression Share = impressions / total eligible impressions
Two things that are greatly affecting how often your ads show up are your ad groups’ rank and the campaign budget.
Budget is often a huge factor, especially if your keywords have significant search volume. BOL has created the calculator below for you to determine how much of an increase you should consider so that your ads can show up more. But before we plug in more dollars, BusinessOnline helps clients increase their ads’ presence in the search results by walking them through a series of optimizations.
So where do you start?
First things first, what’s your goal?
While, in the end, the action of a conversion/sale leading to a return on your investment is likely the ultimate goal, determining the primary goal of your campaign will affect your bidding strategy.
If your ad isn’t showing up, first make sure that you’re setting reasonable bid amounts for your ad groups.
Remember, if you’re bidding $5.00 and your competitor is bidding $2.50, when your ad is present and results in a click, you will be charged $2.51, not your top amount. Determine what keywords are of higher/lower interest and value to your goal.
Ensuring your bidding aligns with your goal is a must, but no matter what it’s set to, your campaign is only getting a portion of the overall impression share of search presence that aligns with the targets and bid strategy that you’ve set up. This is where your ad and landing page’s rank, as well as budget, have effects.
On the ad level:
On the landing page level:
Knobs turned, dials tweaked, and your campaign’s rank and CPCs have improved! But there’s still an impression share gap due to budget. Each day when your daily budget is reached, the campaign is paused until the next. If your campaign is best performing, or primarily applicable, during certain days/times, it may be worth dayparting your ads. To determine how much budget would help you achieve more impressions, it’s time to assess impression share lost by budget.
By looking at some of your performance metrics, you can determine how much additional budget would have closed the gap of impression share lost by budget and forecast what those metrics would have been. To do this, you’ll follow the impression share formula steps below. Or just enter the information in our Impression Share Lost by Budget Calculator below!
Let’s say you looked at your campaign in Google Ads and saw the following performance for one month:
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STEP 1 |
Find the Total Impression Eligibility of your campaignImpressions divided by Search Impression Share.
50,000 / .2 = 250,000
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STEP 2 |
Determine how many of the total impressions were lost due to the budgetTotal Impression Eligibility multiplied by Search lost IS (budget) percentage.
250,000 x .65 = 162,500
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STEP 3 |
Determine the total Lost ClicksMultiply this number by the campaign’s average click-through rate (CTR).
162,500 x .03 = 4,875
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STEP 4 |
Calculate the Additional BudgetFinally, multiply this number by the average cost per click (CPC).
4,875 x $2.00 = $9,750
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You now have the amount of additional budget that would have covered the impression share lost by budget. With these numbers, you can also determine your forecasted impressions and clicks:
Projected Impressions |
Find Projected Impressions by adding the result of Step 2 to your campaign’s actual Impression resultsActual Impressions + Lost Impressions = Projected Impressions
50,000 + 162,500 = 212,500
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Projected Clicks |
Find Projected Clicks by multiplying this by your campaign’s actual CTRProjected Impressions x CTR = Projected Clicks
212,500 x .03 = 6,375
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New Budget |
We then get the New Budget Forecast by multiplying Projected Clicks by Average CPCProjected Clicks x Average CPC = Projected Spend
6,375 x $2.00 = $12,750
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I’m sure you’re taking notes, but feel free to use BusinessOnline’s Impression Share Budget Calculator below!