Paid Advertising
Impression Share
The percentage of the impressions your ads actually received out of the total they were eligible to receive.
Definition
Impression Share is the share of available impressions your ads won, calculated by dividing impressions received by the total impressions you were eligible for. It shows how much of your potential market you're actually reaching, and where you're losing it, whether to budget or to ad rank.
In depth
Every keyword has a ceiling of impressions it could earn. Impression Share tells you what slice of that ceiling you captured. The companion metrics, impression share lost to budget and lost to rank, are where the real insight lives: one says you ran out of money, the other says your bid or Quality Score wasn't high enough to compete.
For a marketing budget, impression share reveals headroom. If you're at 40% impression share with strong conversion numbers, there's demand you're leaving on the table, and raising budget or bids could capture more of it profitably. If you're already near 90%, growth has to come from new keywords or channels rather than squeezing the existing ones.
The mistake is chasing 100% impression share as if it were the goal. The last slices of impression share are usually the most expensive and least relevant, so it rarely pays to dominate a term completely. We use impression share to decide where to push and where you've hit the point of diminishing returns.
The formula
Impression Share = Impressions Received ÷ Total Eligible Impressions Worked example
If a remodeler's ads were eligible for 10,000 impressions on 'kitchen remodeler near me' and received 6,000, impression share is 60%, with the missing 40% split between budget and ad rank limits.
Paid Advertising
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