Metrics
Impression Share
Impression share is the percentage of eligible impressions your ads actually received, with the lost share broken out by budget (you ran out of money) and by rank (your bid or quality was too low).
In practice
Impression share answers the question every advertiser asks eventually: how much more is there? Search impression share of 40 percent means you appeared in four of every ten auctions you were eligible for. Lost to budget means the campaign hit its daily cap; lost to rank means it was outbid or out-qualitied.
The two lost-share columns suggest different fixes. Lost to budget on a profitable campaign is an argument for more budget. Lost to rank is an argument for better Quality Score, higher bids, or accepting that some auctions are not worth winning. Top and absolute top impression share tell you how often you held the premium positions, which matters for brand campaigns and for competitive service categories where position drives calls.
Chasing 100 percent impression share is a way to overspend; the goal is to know where the ceiling is and decide deliberately how close to it you want to be.
Why it matters
It shows how much demand you are leaving on the table and why.
RELATED TERMS
Auction Insights
Auction insights is a Google Ads report that shows which other advertisers competed in the same auctions as you, with their impression share, overlap rate, outranking share, and top-of-page rate.
Budget Pacing
Budget pacing is the practice of planning and controlling how ad spend is distributed across days, weeks, and months so that a monthly budget is spent evenly, front-loaded, or concentrated according to demand.
Quality Score
Quality Score is Google's 1 to 10 diagnostic rating of a keyword based on expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience, indicating how well the ad and page match the searcher's intent.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.
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