Click Share vs Impression Share
Last updated
by
Daniel Wade
/
July 28, 2022
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Impression share shows how regularly a promotion shows up in search results, while click share shows how recurrently it was clicked.
More impressions indicate potentiality for more conversion-but this is just a start. Click shares have the most direct impact on conversion. Neither metric is dispensable when evaluating ad performance. Customers have to see your ad (impressions) and learn more (clicks) before they buy (conversion).
Impression Share: The number of views your ads get when placed on top of organic search results as a % of the total number of views that it could have received.
Click Share: Total number of clicks you've gotten in search and shopping campaigns as a percentage of the total number of clicks that you could have received.
Understanding Click Share
The estimation considers all the clicks your advertisement was qualified to get. Your click share is the percentage your campaign got overall. Two components define the number of attainable clicks:
- The number of advertisements showing for each search query
- The quality of the ad
- Click share metric calculation formula:
Click Share = (Clicks Received) 100
In some cases, you may see a negative sign in the Click Share segment. This shows that the ad doesn't have an adequate number of clicks to provide a statistical estimate.
What does Click Share Mean for a Campaign?
This measurement is valuable since it helps to decide how ads can be improved for a competitive edge. Suppose your advertisement has a click share of 40% out of 100 potential clicks. That leaves another 60 clicks on the table. A drill down at the metric might reveal missing ingredients that would have gotten you 100% click share. The most popular include:
- Bidding higher
- Expanding extensions
- Raising the budget
- Showing more products for clients in search queries
What to Do with the Click Share Metric
The click share metric's advantages as a core marketing value revolve around improving performance and optimizing traction from your pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
Here are a few different ways to leverage click share to improve value per dollar of your ad:
Find growth opportunities. Find product groups that might create more traffic. When you discover these changes, you can expand offers and improve the nature of your advertisement feed.
Analyze traffic. Build up a superior comprehension of traffic trends. When you get a higher perspective on the traffic showing up on your site, you will have the option to make more precise projections and more brilliant advertising choices.
Benchmark against competitors. Use the metric to measure your performance vs. the competition. More clicks show a developing interest in what you have to bring to the table. This furnishes you with an upper hand as you can expand clicks by streamlining your ads as per the click share metric.
Gauge engagement and relevance. You can determine the viability of your ad by looking at the click rate metric. You can consider this a reliable metric for your campaign's relevance and engagement.
Improve click-through rate. By addressing the causes of a low click share rate, you improve the chances of getting a higher click-through rate. You can use the clock share rate to project the click-through rate.
How You Can Improve Click Share
What happens if an ad gets a relatively low click share rate? This a typical issue, yet you'll be happy to hear that it isn't difficult to fix. Here are examples of the things you can do to fix a low click share.
Raise your bidding for keywords that can to drive changes and create a better yield on ad spend
Enhance all item titles and descriptions to improve relevance with client needs. With improved relevance, you can draw in more qualified clients from search results pages.
Use better product images. HD, hi-res, and clear is the picture quality you should employ in your ads. They indicate a professional and trustworthy business dedicated to transparency and meeting user needs.
Improve your impression share. Yes, click share and impression shares are tied at the hip. You need views to get clicks. A battle-tested approach to improving click share and CTR is fixing a low impression share.
What is Impression Share?
Impression share, otherwise called search impression share SIS is the number of impressions you have gotten as a % of the number of impressions you were qualified for forgetting.
The formula for calculating impression share
Impression share = (impressions/total number of impressions) 100
Every business wants a ranking on the top of Google's search results. Here there is a staggering volume profoundly qualified and ready to buy clients. In Google ads, impression shares are influenced by factors such as bids, quality score, targeting accuracy, and the offer's nature.
60% impression share implies that out of the estimated total of views your campaign would have gotten in SERPs, you missed out on slightly less than half of them.
What is the Acceptable Impression Share?
Any results-oriented marketer should ask themselves this question, for the answer can be the difference between ad wastage and splendid campaign performance.
100% Search impression share is the perfect number. But does anybody ever score that? You would need to have the most foolproof objectives, targeting, keywords, and other best-selling ad elements.
95% is also a good number of impressions for branded keywords. 80% should be the cap for non-branded search terms. Be that as it may if your keyword is extremely competitive and you have a restricted spending plan, at that point, you for an impression share of around 60%.
Unlike click shares, getting higher impression shares is not necessarily a good thing for your bottom line, yet it still matters. You need to zero in on the quality of traffic, not quantity. Suppose you get a 95 % impression share; that's a good number, right? If your objective was to double leads and you fail to get anything from the 95 % impression share, then it's useless.
Three things to note:
- If you are getting a high click share rate, you are well on your way to more traffic and leads
- If you are getting a high impression share, look at it closely because it may not mean anything for your ad ROI
- If you are getting a low impression share, you can expect a low click share
How to Improve Impression share
Don't stop at the metric. Use it to scope down on the key issues eating into the efficiency of your campaign. Here is how to improve impression share and, in turn, drive up your click share.
Look at the causes of low impression share. When you click on your impression share number in your ads manager, it will open up a chart demonstrating:
- The impressions you're getting (in green),
- The impressions you missed out on because of a low advertisement rank (yellow),
- Those you are missing because of spending limitations (blue).
Use this data to determine the things you should do to improve your ad performance.
Improve ad ranking. If you're passing up impressions because of a low ad rank, there are two possible culprits. One is that your bidding is excessively low, or two, your Google ads quality score is excessively low, or you offer excessively low.
Rank is a product of your quality score and your greatest CPC offer, so if either is too low, you will have a lower advertisement rank. In case you're coming in at rank five, and Google shows only four outcomes, you've lost the position.
Do better with keywords. In case you're losing impressions and want to find the root cause, drill down on each of your keywords. Each keyword will get you different outcomes, diverse CPCs, distinctive advertisement positions, and much more.
The ad manager can show which keywords are getting you results and which aren't. You can see which have high CPCs and the least conversion rates. You might have to remove some of these keywords to improve your general outcomes and save a budget for high-converting keywords. Increase budget. In case you're missing out on impression shares for a well-created high-converting campaign, you might need to do something about your budget.
Key Points to Note Click Share vs Impression Share
- Click share measures what percentage of the total clicks produced for the targeting (you and everyone in the niche) you got.
- Impression share is what you got out of the total impressions available for the keywords you targeted with the ad.
- Click share may be directly proportional to impression share. However, impression SHARE is not necessarily directly proportional to click share. You can use your click share metric to explore more opportunities for growth, including extensions, budget, and bidding strategies.
- You can use your impression share metric to identify opportunities for improving add placement and ranking.
It would be wise to embrace both click share and impression share metrics in your PPC strategy, but be clear about the differences. Better yet, remember that these are no more than estimates. You don't have to continuously adjust your bidding, budgeting, and keywords every time there is a slight fluctuation in the values.
About THE AUTHOR
Daniel Wade
After working for multiple digital advertising agencies and managing hundreds of client accounts and spending millions of dollars via Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Native Ads and Direct Media Buying, I took things out on my own and started SparrowBoost. Now, my tight-knit team and I continue to get smarter and more efficient at running our own campaigns and we share our knowledge with you.
Learn more about SparrowBoost