Impression Share: How Often Your Ads Appear in the Auction
Impression share is the percentage of eligible ad impressions your ads actually receive, revealing how much of the auction you are losing.
Impression Share is the percentage of eligible ad impressions your ads actually receive.
What It Is
Impression share is the percentage of times your ads appear out of the total number of times they were eligible to show.
It is reported for search, display, and Shopping campaigns and is one of the clearest indicators of paid visibility.
A low number means you are missing opportunities you already paid to be eligible for.
The Three Types
- Search impression share across the entire auction.
- Lost impression share due to budget.
- Lost impression share due to rank.
- Eligibility changes as keywords, budgets, and competition move.
- Separate reporting by device and network.
- Differences between exact, phrase, and broad matching.
Why It Matters
- Low share means missed traffic opportunities.
- Budget losses are usually quick to fix.
- Rank losses point to bidding and quality score work.
- It reveals where competitors are winning the auction.
- It helps decide where extra budget actually pays off.
How to Improve It
- Raise budgets where share is lost to budget.
- Improve quality score and bids where lost to rank.
- Use negative keywords to focus spend on relevant searches.
- Refine ad copy and landing pages to lift quality score.
- Adjust targeting to match the searches you can win.
- Recheck the split between budget and rank losses after each change.
Common Mistakes
- Raising budget when the real problem is rank.
- Chasing 100 percent share on unprofitable keywords.
- Ignoring the difference between budget and rank losses.
- Optimizing share without watching cost per conversion.
- Forgetting that share is measured against a moving eligibility pool.
Before: a campaign shows in only half of its eligible searches.
After: the team raises the budget and improves the ad relevance.
The result: impression share climbs toward the top of the auction.
The lesson: what you do not show for is traffic you cannot win.
Quick Tip
Review impression share in the campaign report and separate budget losses from rank losses before changing anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
Impression Share, in Short
Eligible impressions you do not win are lost traffic.
Fix budget losses first, then rank.
Chase the share that converts, not the share that just shows.