Last year, Google Ads announced that Target Search Page Location and Target Outranking Share bid strategies would no longer be available for new campaigns. Last month, Google began to transition existing campaigns using these strategies to use the Target Impression Share strategy.
If you have a campaign that was transitioned to Target Impression Share bidding or are interested in trying out this bidding strategy, we’ll take a look at it more in depth in this post.
What is Impression Share?
As a refresher, impression share is the percentage of impressions your ads receive compared to the total number of impressions that your ads were eligible to receive.
Impression share = impressions / total eligible impressions
To estimate impression share, Google looks at the ad auctions over the course of the day, and uses internal data such as quality for you and other participants in the same ad auctions.
How Target Impression Share Bidding Works:
Target Impression Share bidding allows Google to automatically set bids to help your ads achieve the impression share goal you set for your campaigns.
There are three options for the Target impression share strategy, depending on where you want your ads to show. You can set a goal for your ads to show on the absolute top of the page, on the top of the page, or anywhere on the search results page.
Once you select where on the search results page you want to target, you’ll next set the “Percent (%) impression share to target.” This is how often you want your ads to appear in the search page area you select when other people search for your keywords.
For example, if you choose an Impression Share target of 70% on the top of the results page, Google Ads will automatically set your CPC bids to help show your ads on the top of the page 70% of the total possible amount of times they could show.
The Max CPC bid limit is a cap on bids set by this bid strategy. You can set a bid limit to make sure you don’t overspend on keywords, but it is important not to set this limit too low or it can prevent you from reaching your Impression Share goal.
Bid adjustments and Target impression share
Since Target Impression Share bidding helps optimize your bids based on real-time data, your existing bid adjustments won’t be used. You can still set mobile bid adjustments of -100%, to prevent your ad from showing on mobile devices. You don’t need to remove any existing bid adjustments, they just won’t be used.
Here are some results we have seen in previous campaigns using target impression share if you’re interested!
Have you tried Target Impression Share Bidding for your campaigns? If so, let us know how they performed in the comments below!
