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The last couple of years have seen an enormous overhaul of the Adwords control panel. There have been a raft of new functions, report writers, automated tools, extensions and perhaps most useful of all - new metrics to help you understand your business.
If you operate in the Adwords Industry, it can be very hard to keep abreast of these evolutions as you often get caught up in the day-to-day. But as an agency it is in our best interest to stay up-to-date on the latest developments. So it is fair to say that Google has been keeping us very busy over the last couple of years.
An earlier blog we wrote speaks of the importance of Quality Score, an too often forgotten metric by clients. Today we'd like to talk about another incredibly useful metric that we find goes under the radar, that being Search Impression Share (SIS) which snuck into the Adwords control panel back in 2014.
To understand why (SIS) is such an important metric we first need understand what the whole journey for the customer looks like. So typically when managing Adwords you’ll be looking at the performance of keywords, how many impressions does each keyword generate, and from that,
-How many clicks can I get to the website?
-What's the Click Through Rate
-Can we do it at an average Cost per click that keeps us in budget?
From here, we need to understand the onsite behaviour. Will those visits lead to a conversion rate? etc. This is the classic funnel of user behaviour and continuously optimising ads to improve CTR and lower CPCs is the game to continue making your marketing more and more profitable.
In this scenario the Impression Volume, the combined total of all keywords impression volume, represents the market size of the business, of which we are typically trying to get a CTR of 2/3 %. Therefore, by doing more keyword research and continually uncovering new “pools” of impressions to tap into, we can help build the market size and the potential traffic to the website.
This however, can be subject to the law of diminishing returns once the best keywords have been uncovered, you have to work increasingly hard to make smaller and smaller gains. However the biggest wins are probably staring you in the face, and this is where understanding what your overall Search Impression Share is and why it is what is, is so important.
On a standard Adwords display select ‘modify columns’ and from the drop-down select ‘competitive metrics’ and here you will find the family of metrics which relate to Search Impression Share.
Search Impression Share essentially sits in front of Impressions in the “funnel” and whilst you think you might be exposed to a 100% of the market it may actually only be at 30/40% on your top keywords. This effectively means that the potential market size (on keywords you are already heavily optimised for on site) could be 2/3 times bigger! Excited yet?
Very usefully, Adwords provides a family of metrics to help you piece together where you share is being lost and it splits the loss into “Lost Through Budget” or “Lost Through Rank”.
Search IS (Lost to Budget) means that your budget is restricted in some way, either through a financial budget or possibly because you schedule ads to only run at certain times. So actually your ads won’t be eligible to be seen to 100% of the Market impressions.
You tend to find a lot of impressions are lost through rank on mobile devices, where the real estate to have your ad displayed is extremely limited and expensive and is where I see a lot of impression share being lost.
The temptation on both of these is just to solve it by bidding more, such is the allure of juicy untapped pool of impressions. However if you are already running well-optimised, profitable campaigns such action could suddenly disrupt that. Instead I like to view as a challenge thrown down by Google to improve your Search IS just by being an even better digital marketeer. I will divert my energies into very granular optimisation in the areas of the account that show the biggest loss on Impression Share versus the potential reward.
This helps to filter out the queries you don’t want to be displayed for and will improve your Quality Score. It will also help identify new pools of potential keywords to potentially separate into their own campaign and optimise around.
Understanding is crucial, is it my budget? My ad schedule? Is it poor rank? Is it on Mobile? Is it on Text Ads or PLAs? You need to zone in on the problems and tackle them one after another in an order of priority
For text ads, it will essentially come down to tactics to improve your Quality Score that will in return improve your Ad Rank and no extra cost. Always run a minimum of 3 Ads on rotation per Ad Group that optimise towards to better CTR, this will improve your Quality Score over time.
Don’t see this as a way doubling your business overnight, nothing profitable in Adwords is achieved instantly (or rarely at least!) you need to understand the data first, tweak it, learn from what works and look for week on week improvements that over the course of 6 months will start to make a material difference to your traffic levels.
Contact us to find out more.
Chris has been at the forefront of eCommerce and a pioneer of online retailing since the early 00s. A 5-time Drapers Award winner, Chris has extensive experience in developing fashion brands online.
Chris founded Cake in 2016. Based in Birmingham, with offices nationwide, Cake specialises in helping fashion brands understand their market online and then helps to develop appropriate strategical direction to achieve their plan, all backed by his 20 years of operating in the retail market.
