Ask The Expert – Why aren’t my ads appearing at the top of the search results?

As an Advertiser, it can be really frustrating when your search ads aren’t appearing at the top of results pages and when you’re not there’s one metric we can turn to at a campaign level that can help us understand this, and that’s impression share. That’s the achieved impressions as a proportion of your estimated eligible impressions for that campaign, there are also two other supplementary metrics we like to use alongside this and that’s lost impression share by budget and lost impression share by rank.

So to take the first of those, that’s lost impression share by budget, that’s the proportion of your perfect impression share that you’re losing just because your campaign budgets are set too low. Impression share lost due to rank is slightly more complex and this is essentially Google’s way of understanding how to rank ads in auction. This is made up of your keyword Max bids and your quality score as well as some other things as well, so to improve this what you really need to be focusing on is whether or not you can increase your bids, or whether or not you can improve your quality score.

Why not drag these columns into your campaign and keyword interfaces on Google ads and you’ll be able to get a deeper understanding of your impression share performance.
Of course, that’s not everything, there are other factors as well including competitors that may be influencing this too!

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