It’s always most important to base all your Google marketing decisions upon what returns the highest return on investment (ROI), not whether your marketing reaches everyone in the search engine marketing world. That being said, have you ever wondered just how much of the PPC market you are saturating with your Adwords advertising? Tracking that would enable you to get a feel for the relative impact of your targeted campaigns on specific geographic areas, which can help you make decisions on where to boost your budgets, decrease funding, or reallocate elsewhere.
The great news is that the Google Adwords Reports tool now allows you to tell what your Impression Share (IS) is. According to the Google Adwords blog, it means the percentage of the time your ads show related to the total possible chances they could be served, based upon the account or campaign settings that the report is being run for. So you can run the report in such a way that you can find out what your share is for particular terms in specific cities, states, or countries.
We’ve already found it incredibly useful in the field of real estate, where knowing how much draw you have in different communities can make a world of difference. We’ve already been drawing up plans to refocus all our campaigns so that they more aggressively target the areas that our clients don’t have as strong a presence in. It has also been helpful in that we can be more direct with our clients as to how competitive their respective pay per click markets really are. It definitely takes some of the guesswork out to be able to say with confidence that your client has a very strong share in their market. So thank you, Google, for continuing to make the entire Adwords operation more transparent.
Definitely start using the Impression Share metric today, and report back any other helpful uses you’ve found for this new Adwords functionality.