Part Two-How far can you scale your Google Ads volume?

Can you 10x your Google Ads results?

It depends on how much of the existing search volume for your keywords you are already capturing. The Impression Share metric in your Google Ads account tells you this.

I explained the details of in yesterday’s post, the first in this 3-part series.

Today, we go a bit deeper to understand the implications on budgets and future performance. 

In the “Competitive Metrics” section in your Google Ads account, you can see different variants of Impression Share. 

Impression share metrics come in two formats:

1. Impression Share: The part of the search query pie you are already capturing in your campaigns
2. Lost Impression Share (IS): The part of the search query pie you currently leave on the table.

Impression Share + Lost Impression Share = 100%

Very simple, but essential to remember which of the two you are analyzing at a given time. 

Lost IS (budget) and Lost IS (rank) are the metrics that tell you how you far can scale. 

Lost IS (budget) 

This indicates how many impressions you miss out on because of insufficient campaign budgets.

For example, your Lost IS (budget) is 50%. That means you could be spending 2x your current budget. 

A word of caution:

If you use mainly exact match keywords, you can easily scale, and performance should remain consistent. If you are using phrase or even broad match, I explained yesterday that the pool of eligible search queries is not clearly defined. In this case, when you go for more impressions, you might show for queries with less relevance. Which impacts efficiency. 

Lost IS (rank)

This metric tells you which percentage of impressions you miss out on because your ad rank is too low. 

Quick reminder: Ad rank = Quality Score x Max. CPC Bid

You can improve this metric by improving your Quality Score and/or increasing your CPC bids, Target CPA or Target ROAS. 

This means that once you have maxed out your quality score optimization, the only way to decrease Lost IS (rank) is through higher bids, which will translate to lower efficiency. 

Lost IS (rank & budget) and bid strategies

If you are using an automated bid strategy WITHOUT a target (Maximize Conversions without a Target CPA or Maximize Conversion Value without a Target ROAS or, god forbid, Maximize Clicks), then Lost IS (budget) and Lost IS (rank) become muddled. The system has no guardrail for how much it should bid and aims to spend the full budget. That makes it more difficult to estimate the potential accurately. Dialing in your campaigns and setting a Target CPA or Target ROAS before scaling should be your priority.

This should help you to confidently calculate your potential volume. In the last part of this series, we will explore the differences between Impression Share, Top Impression Share, and Absolute Top Impression Share. See you tomorrow!