Best way to Improve Search Impression Share

Grateful for any pointers.

All this campaigns keywords have QS of 8 out of 10 or 9 out of 10..
Counting in the last fortnight search impressions best kw has been around 80% but sadly the worst around 20%. These kw still have a high QS.

Do I need to build tighter groups with specific kw optimized landing pages.

Thanks to the guru's for pointers.

Bit of advice in this area would be useful as well. I have my PPC landing pages on my main site which ranks reasonably high in organic and occupies a number of 1 spots in the local packs. These landing pages (currently two) are as I say on the main site but are not linked from the menu structure. There are links on the landing pages though which take it back to the main site.
I have always been hesitant about building more landing pages in this fashion as it may negatively affect the organic and local rankings.

Should I be worried and is there a better way to achieve what I want (which is exposure to as much traffic as I can get, don't we all)

Search impression of any ads depends on the keywords that we are using. If you use generic keywords and broad match keywords, the search impression of your Ads will increase.

Gwenn said:

Search impression of any ads depends on the keywords that we are using. If you use generic keywords and broad match keywords, the search impression of your Ads will increase.

Click to expand...

They are both generic and broadmatch with a large negative list (which I add too all the time).

KW's are seasonal searches and will be dependant on weather outside the searchers door and the time of year.

Maybe they are just not driving that many impressions just yet?

I'll start with your last comment. Typically, you don't want to use generic terms. You want to use terms that are as specific as possible and in the way that people search.

For instance, if you sold furniture, you could bid on "furniture" but I would not recommend it. Just this keyword would use up all your budget by itself. Conversion rate would be low and may in fact lead to negative ROI in this case. Adding negative keywords would be an ongoing process, time better put elsewhere.

What you want to do is bid on "kitchen table" for example. Of course, land the clicks on an appropriate page. You won't need as many negatives also. The more precise the keyword to the product (more words in the keyword), the less need for negatives. How many negatives will be needed for a "mahogony kitchen table"?

Next thing is, don't use broad match types. Use the newer broad match modified type. This is for the discovery phase which you are doing. Using BMM will also cut down on negatives and result in better quality impressions.

Having said that, your QS indicates that at least your ads are relevant to the keywords.

Now on to the question of impression share.

If you theme groups by keywords, no need to look at individual keyword IS. I never look at keyword IS, only group and campaign. In fact, I wasn't even sure there was a keyword IS.

Seems strange to have such a difference in keyword IS. Is the 20% IS keyword one with a high impression count?

Here's the thing. IS is driven a lot by your budget. Obviously, your group's IS falls between 20% and 80%. Let's call it 50% overall but probably lower if the 20% keyword has a high percentage of overall impressions.

In essense, Adwords is telling you that your budget is only targeting 50% of all searches for your keywords. Part of the solution is of course to increase your budget, in this case double it and you'll get closer to 100%.

The other thing affecting IS is the number of competitors.

There are a total of 8 to 11 ad spots - 8 on the right side of the screen and up to 3 above the SERPs. If there are fewer competitors, say 10 or less, you have a better chance to have your own ads show almost all the time (assuming high enough budget), even with low bid and/or QS of 3. That's because the system will try to fill all available spots with the inventory it has.

But suppose there are 50 competitors trying to fill 11 ad spots. The system won't show the same ones all the time. It will rotate the ads, different advertisers at different times and in different positions, to gather data on each advertiser and ads. So even with a QS of 10 and bidding high enough to be in the top few spots, your ads won't show 100% of the time.

Yes, you want to get 100% but this hardly ever happens. One client I manage has few competitors, shows in the first position over 90% of the time but the IS is 98.7%. That's close enough for me and won't bother to find out what happened to the remaining 1.3%.

I don't know which, your budget or competitors, is driving down IS. If your budget is exhausted each day, you'll need to increase it to get higher IS. I assume you have positive ROI so that should not scare you. If you are not spending all your budget, it's high competition and there's little you can do about that except further increase QS so that the system chooses your ads more often since it will make Google more money.