You never get a second chance to make a first impression, but when it comes to advertising on Google, impressions mean something completely different.
With Google Ads, an impression is simply how often your ad is shown. In short, every time your ad is shown in search results or on a site in the Google network, Sometimes, only a portion of your ad can be shown, such as with Google Maps. On Google Maps, for example, you’ll only see your business name and the first line of text.
In your Google Account itself, you’ll see the abbreviating “Impr.” to show the number of impressions for your ad. But even if you now know what impressions mean as they relate to Google Ads, it doesn’t answer questions like:
And much more. It’s understandable to have a lot of questions about how Google Ads work for your online jewelry store. Let’s take a closer look at what impressions mean and how they factor into your jewelry store marketing.
If you’re advertising with branded keywords, you should ideally have around 95% impression share. With non-branded keywords, around 80% is a good number, whereas with ultra-competitive keywords where you’re working with a limited budget, you may see an impression share of around 60%. Your results may vary depending on your budget, the keywords you’re targeting and other factors, but in general, these are the benchmark numbers to aim for.
Now, keep in mind that a good impression share is not the same thing as a click-through rate. Generally speaking, a good click-through rate for e-commerce sites in search is around 2.69% compared to display at 0.51%.
With an impression, a user simply sees the advertisement. A click, as the name implies, happens when the user actually clicks the advertisement and goes to the landing page or other destination.
One of the things you’ll notice as you continue going through paid advertising is the possibility of lower impression shares. If your ads aren’t performing well, it’s possible that you will lose impressions due to rank. But what exactly does that mean?
In short, the two things that contribute to how and where your ads rank are your max CPC bid and your quality score. In order to increase your impression share, you’ll need to look at both of these factors.
If you need to immediately increase your impression share, you’ll want to increase your max CPC bid. To do this, look at the keywords that have a low impression rate and raise your max CPC bid to slightly more than the top of page CPC bid estimate (if you’re not sure what this is, you can add that column to your overview in the dashboard)
This strategy is especially effective if your quality score is 7 or higher. But if your budget is tight, you may end up with another problem which is impression share lost due to budget. If that’s the case, you'll want to prioritize the keywords that are performing the best among all of the ones you’re using.
One of the reasons why impression shares can be low in Google ads is because of your Quality Score. Improving this takes time and if your keyword Quality Score is 4 or less, it’s definitely worth spending time to get it right. When you click on the quality score, you’ll see the individual components that you can address so that you can focus on making improvements.
The good news is that with some attention paid to your ad budget as well as your copy, you can improve your ad rank and your Quality Score at the same time, which in turn can help you reap a larger share of ad impressions. To learn more about putting paid advertising to work for your online jewelry store, contact the experts at GemFind Digital Solutions today!