Google AdWords adds share-of-voice metric

Google has added another metric which will give pay-per-click advertisers more insight in to how their campaigns are performing.

by Helen Leggatt

google%20adwords%20logo.gif Google AdWords advertisers now have access to additional reports via the “AdWords Report Center”. The new feature, called “Impression Share”, is similar to “share of voice”. In simple terms it allows an advertiser to compare the percentage of times their ads were displayed with the number of opportunities there were for those ads to be displayed.

There are several ways in which this information can be used by online advertisers to improve upon campaign performance. Knowing that an ad is being diplayed on only a small percentage of the potential times it could have been shown can lead to useful testing of keywords, timings, budget levels and conversion levels to see whether increasing “impression share” has a positive affect on ROI.

Of course, increasing “impression share” may be not the solution if additional impressions, and consequently budget spend, have no effect on conversion rates and advertisers might want to consider revisiting keywords and landing pages.

“Not every advertiser's goal is to appear each time his or her ads have the opportunity to show; however, Impression Share is a convenient way to assess shifts in the competitive landscape as well as ways to diagnose where you're losing Impression Share,” according to the Inside AdWords blog.