Impression share
Impression share is the percentage of the times you were eligible to appear that you actually appeared.
At 40%, you showed up for 4 in 10 of the searches you could have.
Google splits what you missed into 2 reasons: lost to budget, and lost to rank.
Lost to budget means the money ran out during the day, so raising the budget puts you back in front of searches you're already winning.
Lost to rank means your bid or Quality Score wasn't enough, which is a relevance and bidding question rather than a spending one.
Reading the 2 apart is the whole value of the metric, because the fix is completely different.
What this means for you
This is the metric that tells you whether there's more room in the market at your current cost per lead. A campaign at 90% impression share has nowhere left to grow without changing something.
This one sits under Google Ads management.
Want to know how this looks on your account?
I'll look at what you've got and tell you where it stands, in the same plain terms.
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