What are impressions in Google Ads?

Understanding what impressions are in Google Ads is important in order to assess the visibility of your ads and what is the potential reach of your campaigns based on your budget. Although it is a traffic metric, it does have an impact on sales opportunities.

In a previous post we already mentioned impressions when talking about how to evaluate your campaigns. The question of what impressions are in Google Ads has a fairly simple answer. Every time an ad from your e-commerce appears on the search results page, an impression is counted.

Be careful, your ad doesn’t have to appear in its entirety to get impressions. Sometimes only your business name or location will come out. This is especially common when your ad appears on Google Maps, for example.

Table of Contents

Avoid generating clicks and impressions of your ads

From the Mix With Marketing team we consider it necessary to issue a warning to advertisers who are not too familiar with how advertising works on Google. If you want to know if your ad is getting impressions, you should never use the search engine to check for yourself.

Keep in mind that if you enter keywords that you are working on in your campaigns in the search box and when your ad is activated you click on it, you will be spending your budget. In addition, Google can determine that a user considers an ad to be irrelevant if it has appeared many times but has not clicked on it. In other words, you may not receive your ads, but that doesn’t mean there is a real problem.

All these inconveniences have a solution. If you want to check if your ads are showing with specific keywords, on certain devices such as mobile phones or computers and in the locations you have chosen, all you have to do is use the “ad preview” option found in the menu. planning within the tools and settings of your account.

What is an impression in Google Ads?

Without the interference of your own searches, you will get more reliable data on impression share. This metric is nothing more than the impression share of your ads compared to the total number of potential impressions. This information helps you to know if your budget is tight or not and if you have room for improvement to reach more users.

The impression in Google Ads can be seen in all the campaign types available in Google Ads regardless of whether it is the Search Network, the Display Network or Shopping. Of course, this data must be analyzed independently by type of campaign and never seen at the account level.

Here is the formula that is used to calculate the impression share, although you do not need to do the operation manually. You can add the column with this data at the campaign, ad group or product level and even keyword level.

Impression share = impressions / total eligible impressions

Impressions related metrics

We insist, the percentage of impressions is a metric that has to be analyzed separately according to the type of campaign. In other words, you have to evaluate, on the one hand, the percentage of impressions from Display, on the other hand from Search and on the other hand from Shopping. Do not lose sight of the fact that each type of campaign is aimed at a different business objective.

Search or Display Impression: The number of impressions you’ve reached divided by the estimated number of potential impressions. This metric allows you to quickly know the visibility of your campaigns.

Percentage of impressions lost by budget: It is the percentage of times that your ad did not show in the SERP because your budget was limited. This can happen for various reasons such as that your investment is not enough for the business sector in which your e-commerce operates or that there are simply some days with higher traffic in which your budget runs out earlier than usual.

Percentage of impressions lost by ranking or classification: It is the percentage of times your ad was not shown due to a low ad ranking in the auction. The quality level is one of the basic indicators that can serve as a guide so that this does not happen to you.

Top impression share: According to Google Ads Help, this is the “percentage of ad impressions that show anywhere above organic search results.”

Absolute Top Impression Share: This metric goes one step further than the one described just above. It tells you the percentage of impressions of your ads that appear in a preeminent position within the search results. It is not equivalent to the old average position metric but it will help you to know if your ads are standing out enough.

And here ends this basic explanation about what impressions are in Google Ads and the main metrics associated with them. You have to understand the data provided by the tool to be able to translate that information into valuable actions for your business.