I have a confusing problem and i was hoping someone here can shed some light on it for me.
I have a client and am having problems getting him to spend his budget and the only thing that I can see is that he is losing impressions due to rank.
He has an average position of 4.3, so why would I have a lost impression share of 68%?
There were about 6 KW's that were probably sitting on the top of the 2nd page, but these weren't high volume terms either.
Does anyone have any similar problems?
He has an average position of 4.3, so why would I have a lost impression share of 68%?
Just a quick 'drive-by' observation:
For campaigns opted into the content network, being lower than third position can limit impression there - as many publisher sites limit the number of ads they show.
AWA
My content network only campaigns always return N/A for Impression Share metrics in performance reports. Therefore, I assume that content network impressions are not considered in calculating Impression Share in a hybrid search/content campaign report, though content network impressions would influence Avg Pos numbers.
briggidere: Is your Avg Pos. for search roughly the same as the combined 4.8 Avg Pos? Or is this a search-only campaign?
I've encountered this problem many times in search-only campaigns with Avg Pos [1-3] and >50% lost IS (Rank). I suspect that AdWords reduces the amount of impressions received by ad groups/keywords with low quality scores, even when the maximum bid is sufficient to trigger an ad under the officially stated (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score) formula. I base this suspicion on only observing this phenomenon of Avg Pos. < 3 and Lost IS (Rank) > 50%, when Min CPC > $0.10
If your adrank is too low, it means that your keyword regularly 'loses' the auction and hence you lose impression share. The only way to increase adrank is to increase your QS (which can fluctuate a lot espaecially for new campaigns/keywords) or increase your maxcpc
I think I know the problem here, this is something I have asked my adwords account manager again and again without a full response.
From what I understand, broad match on the term 'insurance' for example can show your ad for any query with 'insurance' in it. However, as we know, this doesn't mean that it WILL show for every query as this depends on your quality score for the other keywords searched for.
In that respect, you could have an impression share of less than 70% because your account quality score is too low for the other keywords searched in conjunction with 'insurance' (e.g. queries like 'textbook on insurance theory' or 'insurance jobs').
This is why the metric 'exact match IS' is included on the google reports.
Consider also that your average position only accounts for queries where your ad is deemed to be relevant enough to show. This explains the high avg. position metric as highly relevant ads for broad matches tend to be shown in higher positions.
The short solution to this problem: Run some search query reports and add the corresponding terms using exact match to ensure your ads are seen by more people.
