Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Mining for Gold on the Campaign and Ad Groups Tabs

AdWords is such a powerful and complex program that Google has to hide many of its features behind innocuously named buttons to keep us from getting overwhelmed by an ocean of options and data. In this section, we show you some of the most useful features hiding in the AdWords interface.

Impression Share

In Chapter 11, we show you how to view the impression share data. Impression share shows what percentage of available impressions your keywords have generated. An impression share of 100% indicates that every time folks in your geo-target search for your keywords, your ad appeared on a page of search results that was served to them. An impression share less than 100% means that you aren't getting all the traffic available to you. And because you get a precise number, you can tell exactly how many more impressions could be yours if you do the right things.

Say that your current impression share for a campaign is 25%, and the loss is due to a combination of budget and ad rank limitations (see Chapter 11). This tells you that you could get four times as much traffic by raising your bids and your budget. Should you go out and do this immediately? That depends. If the traffic you're getting is profitable, you can open the spigot much wider by increasing your daily budget. You can also open the traffic spigot by increasing your bids, but you don't want to increase them past the point of profitability.

Here are two reasons you wouldn't ...