This week, Google finally started letting advertisers see Impression Share metric for their Content Network campaigns.  If you are wondering what Impression Share is, this is the number that tells you what percentage of the time you showed up for eligible impressions — in other words, how many times your ad showed up vs. the number of times it could have showed up.  Now, what does one do with these metrics?  Depending on the number of ad groups you have in your Content Network Campaign, Content Network Impression Share may or may not be useful to you.  Like Search Impression Share, if you are maxing our your opportunity at a given lead cost, Impression Share metrics may be a moot point for you.  However, they can be a good indicator of missed opportunity, especially Exact Match Impression Share for Search.

Presently, I have a number of Content Network campaigns, and many of them show a much lower Impression Share than I would imagine for them — either “under 10%” or just above that amount.  However, others show in the 20% to 60% range, which seems more acceptable.  The numbers do not make total sense to me given campaigns that show high positions and seemingly have excellent coverage are saying they have low Impression Share.  This may have to do with ad groups that show up in poor positions muddying the entire campaign.  Ultimately, Content Network Impression Share is just one more metric to let you know how you are doing with maximizing your opportunity.  So, if you really want to try to maximize this metric, perhaps consider splitting up ad groups into different campaigns — hopefully your ad group reorganization doesn’t do more harm than good!