Google announced that the impression share metrics reports is coming to the ad group level in order to provide advertisers with data to help them "identify high performing ad groups that aren't capturing the majority of available impressions." Not only is Google bringing the impression share data to the ad group level, but they are updating their algorithms for coming up with that data.
Google said in the upcoming weeks, likely early February, you will see three new columns that are available in the ad group reports. They include:
- Impr. Share: the percentage of impressions you received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.
- Lost IS (Rank): the share of impressions lost due to your Ad Rank. Note that Lost IS (rank) will not be shown if you were at or near your budget for part or all of a given day (a.k.a. were “budget constrained”) during the date range being examined.
- Exact Match IS: (Search Network only) the percentage of impressions you received for searches that exactly matched your keyword divided by the estimated number of exact match impressions you were eligible to receive.
Pam at Search Engine Land posted some pictures, here is one:
Part of this, Google announced they updated how they calculate the impression share. They said the new updated algorithm will make the results more "accurate campaign impression share metrics." With that, you may notice two changes when this is launched:
- Refined campaign-level statistics: Since we are improving our algorithms, we will update all campaign-level impression share metrics back to May 2011. As a result, you will no longer be able to see campaign-level historical impression share metrics before May 2011. If you wish to preserve a record of the pre-May 2011 campaign impression share data, you will need to download a report before January 30, 2012.
- Once-a-day updates: In order to calculate your impression share metrics with a greater degree of accuracy, we will update all impression share metrics once per day (approximately noon Pacific Time [GTM-8]). As a result, the impression share data that you see will not reflect impression share for the current day, and may not include the previous day's impression share as well (depending on what time of the day you run your report).
One advertiser is excited, saying, "This is great new for us and should help boost performance of lower spending accounts much more easily."
Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help and WebmasterWorld.
