Google Ads Impression Share Metrics and Why You Can't Ignore Them

Last Updated on 17 June 2026 by Stu Edwards

When it comes to managing successful Google Ads campaigns, there are several core metrics that are fundamental to improving campaign performance.

In the performance marketing environment where every PPC manager is highly results-driven, the value of some key metrics can may be undermined.

 

In the process, some Google Ads specialists are more likely to focus on metrics that impact conversion KPIs, losing sight of others that play an essential role in the top funnels of the user journey.

Google Ads Impression Share is one of them.

Despite being one of the vital metrics attributed to success or failure, Impression Share (IS) analysis remains under-utilised in many cases.

So we’re here to explain what impression share is and what it means for your account, campaigns, ad groups and keywords.

We’ll learn how Impression Share is calculated, and we’ll give you some tips on how to improve your impression share metrics to ensure you’re getting the very best results for your campaigns.😉

Let’s dive in!

What is Impression Share in Google Ads?

Impression share (IS) is the percentage of impressions your Google Ads received compared to the total impressions they were eligible to receive.

In simple terms, it shows how often your ads actually appeared versus how often they could have appeared.

Google Ads estimates the total impressions a keyword or search term was eligible to receive.

But in reality, your ads only receive a certain number of impressions based on factors in your account, including:

• Your bids
• Your budget
• Device targeting
• Quality Score
• Ad Rank
• Location targeting
• Auction competition

So, if your ad was eligible to show 1,000 times but only appeared 600 times, your impression share would be 60%.

Impression share helps answer a critical question:

Are my ads missing potential visibility because of budget, bids, quality, or competition?

That’s why impression share is one of the most useful competitive metrics in Google Ads.

It doesn’t tell you whether your traffic is profitable, but it shows how much available visibility you are capturing in the auctions you are targeting.

Impression Share Formula

The impression share formula is derived directly from its definition above.

Impression Share is calculated as:

Impressions / total eligible impressions

The total eligible impressions number depends on elements such as targeting, approval status, and quality of the search.

These metrics are reported separately for each campaign and are not aggregated on an account level.

You’ll find the impression share data by navigating to campaigns, ad groups (or product groups for shopping campaigns), and keyword pages in your ad account.

 

 

Having trouble finding these metrics? They might not be selected in your column view to display in the Google Ads UI.

Here’s how to get the data:

> Navigate to the campaign, ad group (or product groups for shopping campaigns), or keyword page view

> Click on the “Columns” icon, then select “Modify Columns”

 

 

> Navigate to “Competitive metrics”.

 

 

> Select all search impression share metrics you need to be displayed and click “Apply”.

 

 

You can now find the metrics displayed in your reporting.

 

How to Calculate Impression Share

To calculate impression share, let’s take this example.

Say the total estimated impressions for one of your keywords was 10,000, and your keyword only received 1,000 impressions.

 

 

Impression share: 1,000 / 10,000

Your impression share will be 10%.

This means that the keyword only received 10% of the impressions you were eligible to get.

So in this example, that means we missed out on 90% of eligible impressions.

That’s 90% of the time your ads didn’t show, by not optimising to get the best impression share for any of your keywords, ad groups, or campaigns.

Is Impression Share The Only Competitive Metric That Matters?

No. There are different types of Google Ads impression share metrics that help you gain insight into your performance.

Here is the impression share breakdown:

• Search Impression Share: Search impression share shows the impression share generated only on the Search Network compared to the impression share you were eligible to get.
• Display Impression Share: This shows the impression share generated only on the Display Network compared to the impression share you were eligible to get.
• Search lost IS (budget): This shows the percentage impression share lost from budget constraints. You’ll only find impression share lost to budget at the campaign level in your account.
• Display lost IS (budget): This is the percentage of impressions lost on Display Network due to budget constraints. Similar to the Search lost IS (budget), this only applies to campaign-level analysis.
• Search lost IS (rank): This breakdown only applies to the Search Network. Impression share lost to rank is the percentage of impressions you lost due to poor ad rank.
• Display lost IS (rank): Provides the percentage of impressions lost on Display Network from poor ad rank.
• Search exact match IS: This shows the search impression share for searches matching exact keywords (or close variants) in your Search Network.

Note: Keep in mind that search impression share metrics for shopping campaigns differ in that they’re obtained from Search Network traffic, not from Display Network or Search Partners

 

Why is Impression Share Important?

Impression share metrics are important because they show how your ads compare with other ads. They indicate missed opportunities and areas worth optimising if a keyword, ad group, or campaign is not performing.

When looking at the impression share metrics defined above, you can tell if a campaign performed poorly due to budget constraints. You can also tell when keywords performed poorly over a period due to poor ad rank.

Let’s take a typical example you might see in your account:

Search impression share for a top-performing keyword went down one week compared to the previous.

To know why that happened, you may need to further look at the Search lost IS (rank) metrics to tell if the rank dropped.

If that’s the case, you could look deeper into the Auction Insights report to know if competitor ads are overlapping, or appearing at a higher position above your ads. You might need to change your bids or adjust your tCPA/ROAS targets.

There are two elements worth looking at when analysing impression share:

Your bids

Low bids on your keyword might mean your ads lose out on first page positioning, or fail to attain top positions in the ad pack. Meaning your ads are not being seen, causing a decrease in Impressions, Clicks, and ultimately conversions.

Your bids should be high enough to get competitively positioned in the SERP. But increasing bids alone won’t make your ads automatically attain top positions.

Ensure all other elements that affect rank work in your favour to achieve higher ranks for your ads.

Look to analyse Ad quality, expected CTR and landing page experience metrics.

Your budget

Budget limitations also significantly affect impression share.

With a budget-constrained campaign, your ads will naturally receive fewer impressions.

Here’s why; if your daily campaign budget runs out, your ads will stop showing. Increasing your budget would mean your ads show longer throughout the day when searches occur – leading to a higher overall impression share.

As you can see, there’s so many aspects to gauge your overall ad performance using impression share metrics alone.

How to Improve Impression Share in Google Ads

Thankfully, it’s not a lost cause if your impression share metrics are falling behind your expectations.

The fastest way to improve impression share in Google Ads is to diagnose why you are missing impressions first.

In Google Ads, lost impression share usually comes down to two core issues:

1. Budget: Your campaign is eligible to show, but your daily budget is too limited.
2. Rank: Your Ad Rank is too low because of bids, Quality Score, ad relevance, landing page experience, expected CTR, or auction competitiveness.

Before making changes, add these columns in Google Ads:

• Search impression share
• Search lost IS (budget)
• Search lost IS (rank)
• Search exact match IS
• Search top IS
• Search absolute top IS

As a reminder, the basic impression formula is:

Impression share = impressions ÷ total eligible impressions

Or, if you are working backwards and want to know how to calculate impressions:

Impressions = impression share × total eligible impressions

So, if your campaign received 4,000 impressions and had a 40% search impression share, Google estimated you were eligible for roughly 10,000 impressions.

That means 6,000 potential impressions were missed. The next question is why.

1. Check Whether Budget or Rank Is the Main Problem

If you want to know how to improve impression share, start with the lost impression share columns rather than guessing.

Here’s a simple troubleshooting framework:

Metric	What It Means	What To Do
High Search lost IS (budget)	Your budget is too low for the available demand	Increase budget, reduce wasted spend, tighten targeting, or adjust ad scheduling
High Search lost IS (rank)	Your Ad Rank is not competitive enough	Improve Quality Score, increase bids, improve ads, or refine landing pages
Low Search exact match IS	Competitors are showing more often for searches closely matching your keywords	Improve keyword structure, bids, ad relevance, and exact match coverage
Low Search top IS	Your ads are showing, but not often near the top	Improve Ad Rank through bids, Quality Score, and stronger creative
Low Search absolute top IS	Your ads rarely show in position one	Use carefully if top placement is strategically valuable, but watch CPA and ROAS

This matters because ‘increase impression share’ doesn’t always mean ‘spend more money.’

Sometimes the better move is narrowing targeting, improving ad quality, cutting wasted queries, or reallocating spend to your highest-converting campaigns.

2. Decrease Regional Targeting

Targeting a wider geographic location can mean a huge pool of available impressions. Isn’t that what every marketer wants?!

The issue here is your efforts span across a larger geographic target location, when you may be seeing your best results in certain cities, metros, states, zip codes, or post codes.

Decreasing your location targeting to more particular locations may mean your ads will serve more frequently to those users who are more likely to convert.

While this change would mean a decrease in impressions available to you, it would also mean a higher impression share for those eligible impressions.

For a local business running Google Ads, this would mean dominating your best locations only, and cutting the fat around poorer performing target areas.

A practical example:

• You target an entire state and have a 22% search impression share.
• Your best conversions come from three metro areas.
• You reduce targeting to those metros only.
• Your eligible impressions decrease, but your budget is now concentrated where performance is strongest.
• Your impression share may increase because you are competing in a smaller, more valuable auction pool.

That’s often a smarter move than chasing more visibility everywhere.

3. Improve Ad Quality

Ad quality highly impacts your impression share.

With higher Quality Scores, Google will show your ads more frequently as they serve the target audience’s needs best.

Google wants advertisers to spend money, and those with the strongest Quality Scores in the auction will see the best overall performance in terms of ad visibility.

Here are some tips on improving your Quality Score:

• Create ad groups that have similar keywords so you can serve the searchers with a highly relevant ad that’s specific to their search.
• Improve your ad CTRs by showing ads that are tightly relevant to the user search. High CTRs will ensure your ads have a higher chance of being clicked on.
• Improve the landing page experience to make it relevant to your ad. The landing page content should match the visitors’ search. The landing page should ideally maintain consistent messaging with the ad text. With a highly relevant and optimised landing page, you should see a higher conversion rate.

Make sure the below is tightly aligned as possible, and you’re halfway to Google Ads paradise… 🙌

User query > Target Keyword > Ad copy text > Landing page experience

If your Search lost IS (rank) is high, improving ad quality should be one of your first priorities.

Increasing bids on weak ads can help you enter more auctions, but it can also make your account more expensive without fixing the real issue.

A good improvement workflow looks like this:

1. Review keywords with low Quality Score.
2. Check whether the keyword is too broad for the ad group.
3. Rewrite headlines to include the primary keyword or close variant.
4. Make the offer clearer in the ad copy.
5. Align the landing page headline with the searcher’s intent.
6. Improve landing page speed, clarity, and conversion path.
7. Reassess impression share after enough data has collected.

For example, if someone searches “emergency plumber near me” and your ad headline says “Affordable Plumbing Services,” it may be relevant, but it could be stronger. A headline like “Emergency Plumber Near You” better matches the query, improves expected CTR, and can help improve Ad Rank.

4. Increase Campaign Budget

As earlier mentioned, campaign budget affects how often your ad is shown. To improve search impression share, ensure your campaigns have a sufficient budget.

If increasing budget isn’t an option, you could analyse historical day of week and time of day data in your account with the aim of prioritising ad spend where you see your best performance. This effectively cuts out poor performing days, or hours during the day.

This will help you squeeze more from your budget, while maintaining a healthy impression share during your eligible ad schedule.

Before increasing budget, double check:

• Which campaigns are limited by budget?
• Which campaigns have the strongest conversion rate?
• Which campaigns have the lowest CPA or strongest ROAS?
• Which days and hours waste the most spend?
• Which locations spend but rarely convert?
• Which search terms are consuming budget without producing leads or sales?

If your Search lost IS (budget) is high and performance is profitable, increasing budget is often the cleanest way to increase impression share.

If performance isn’t profitable, increasing budget only gives Google more room to spend inefficiently.

In that case, reduce waste first.

5. Increase Your Bids

Low bids, or unrealistic tCPA and tROAS targets, will limit your available impressions. Ensure your bids are high enough to improve search impression share.

Increasing bids alone on a low-quality ad won’t guarantee higher ad ranks and better results. Analyse your Quality Score metrics and make improvements before cranking up your bids.

This is especially important with automated bidding.

For example:

• A Target CPA that is too low can restrict delivery.
• A Target ROAS that is too aggressive can reduce eligible impressions.
• A small budget combined with a strict bid strategy can limit learning.
• Low conversion volume can make Smart Bidding more cautious.

If your goal is to improve impression share in Google Ads, you may need to loosen targets gradually rather than making one aggressive change.

A safer approach:

1. Identify campaigns with strong conversion quality.
2. Review Search lost IS (rank).
3. Improve ad relevance and landing pages first.
4. Increase manual CPC bids, or adjust automated bidding targets gradually.
5. Monitor CPA, ROAS, conversion volume, and impression share together.

Don’t optimise impression share in isolation. Higher visibility is only valuable if it helps drive profitable conversions.

6. Segment Impression Share by Device, Location, Keyword, and Time

Account-level impression share can hide the real issue.

A campaign might show 55% search impression share overall, but the breakdown could look very different:

• Mobile: 72%
• Desktop: 31%
• Top city: 78%
• Poor-performing city: 18%
• Brand keywords: 92%
• Non-brand keywords: 24%

That tells a completely different story.

To find the best opportunities, segment impression share by:

• Campaign
• Ad group
• Keyword
• Match type
• Device
• Location
• Hour of day
• Day of week
• Audience segment

This helps you identify where to increase impression share and where not to.

You may find that your best move is not to improve impression share across the whole account, but to increase search impression share on your highest-intent exact match keywords, strongest locations, or best-performing devices.

7. Use Negative Keywords to Protect Budget

Negative keywords do not directly increase Ad Rank, but they can help improve impression share by stopping budget from leaking into poor-fit searches.

If your campaign is losing impression share due to budget, wasted search terms make the problem worse.

Review your search terms report and exclude queries that are:

• Too informational
• Too broad
• Irrelevant to your offer
• Low intent
• Outside your service area
• Associated with jobs, free resources, DIY searches, or competitor terms you do not want to target

For example, a campaign for “commercial cleaning services” might be wasting spend on searches like “commercial cleaning jobs,” “free cleaning checklist,” or “how to start a cleaning business.”

Removing those queries will not increase the total eligible impression pool, but it can help your budget last longer for the auctions that actually matter.

8. Prioritise High-Intent Keywords

Not all impressions are equally valuable.

If your budget is limited, it rarely makes sense to chase impression share across every keyword. You will often get better results by increasing impression share on the keywords closest to revenue.

Prioritise keywords that show strong intent, such as:

• Brand searches
• Exact match service keywords
• “Near me” searches
• Location-based keywords
• Product or service comparison searches
• Bottom-of-funnel terms with strong conversion history

For example, increasing search impression share from 40% to 70% on a high-converting exact match keyword may be more valuable than moving from 10% to 25% on a broad, early-stage keyword.

This is where Search exact match IS becomes particularly useful. If your exact match impression share is low on your best keywords, you may be missing some of the most commercially valuable searches in the account.

9. Improve Landing Page Experience

Landing page experience affects Quality Score, which affects Ad Rank, which affects impression share.

If your landing page is slow, confusing, thin, or mismatched to the search intent, Google has less reason to reward your ad with stronger visibility.

To improve landing page experience, check:

• Does the landing page headline match the keyword and ad promise?
• Is the page fast on mobile?
• Is the primary call to action obvious above the fold?
• Does the page answer the searcher’s main question quickly?
• Is the offer specific enough?
• Are trust signals visible, such as reviews, testimonials, accreditations, results, or case studies?
• Is the form easy to complete?

A stronger landing page can improve both impression share and conversion rate, which is the ideal combination. You are not just paying for more visibility, you are making that visibility more likely to turn into leads or sales.

10. Be Careful With Impression Share Bidding Strategies

Google Ads offers a Target Impression Share bid strategy, but it should be used carefully.

Target Impression Share can be useful when visibility is the main objective, especially for:

• Brand protection campaigns
• Competitor campaigns
• Local campaigns where top visibility is strategically important
• Awareness campaigns with a defined visibility goal

However, it can also increase costs quickly if you use it on broad, non-brand campaigns without strong conversion controls.

Before using Target Impression Share, decide:

• Which campaigns truly need maximum visibility?
• Do you care about anywhere on the page, top of page, or absolute top of page?
• What CPC limit are you willing to set?
• Will the extra visibility still meet your CPA or ROAS targets?

For most performance-focused accounts, impression share should be balanced with conversions, CPA, ROAS, and lead quality.

Quick Checklist: How to Increase Search Impression Share

Use this checklist when you want to improve impression share in Google Ads without wasting spend:

• Add the key impression share columns in Google Ads.
• Check whether you are losing impressions to budget or rank.
• Segment by campaign, keyword, location, device, and time.
• Cut wasted spend with negative keywords.
• Narrow targeting to your strongest-performing regions.
• Improve ad relevance and expected CTR.
• Improve landing page experience.
• Increase budget only where performance is profitable.
• Adjust bids or automated bidding targets gradually.
• Focus on high-intent exact match keywords first.
• Monitor impression share alongside CPA, ROAS, conversion rate, and lead quality.

The goal is not simply to increase impression share everywhere. The goal is to win more of the right auctions, in the right locations, for the right searches, at a cost that still makes sense.

Final Thoughts on Google Ads Impression Share Metrics

Impression share metrics are a critical aspect of any Google Ads account. They show how well your ads perform based on impressions received compared to the potential impressions they could receive.

There’s no one-fit-all solution to improve Google Ads impression share metrics. Different campaigns, ad groups, and keywords will require a different approach.

They’re essential to understanding your broader Google Ads visibility and market share for your campaign / ad group / keyword activity.

If you’re not paying close attention to impression share metrics, you’re likely losing out out on either growth or defensive opportunities to better your campaign performance.

Start by understanding which impression share breakdown is affecting your ad performance before changing your keywords, ad groups, and campaigns (and bids!).

 

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If you have any questions about how impression share metrics, and how proper analysis and optimisations can lift your campaign performance, then get in touch! We’re a dedicated Google Ads management agency and we’d love to hear from you.