Google Display Network Now Shares Competitive Metrics
Google makes changes to its display platform very often. The goal behind these changes is to add additional features to optimize how users can improve their campaigns. Yet, these changes are very often not published.
One of the changes that was recently rolled out, that I think a lot of you will find to be very helpful, is the insight data that Google Adwords now shows you on how your campaigns and your terms perform overall in the competitive market.
This is useful because it allows you to see what you can do to improve your campaigns, and see your campaigns perform comparatively to your competitors. Especially in industries like weddings, financials, and real estate – where terms tend to be very expensive – this will be a very powerful platform enhancement.
So, how do you enable this?
To enable this report, you want to log in to your Google Display program. You can add the competitive metrics on both the Adword level and keyword level. Click on Columns and then Competitive Metrics.
The key things to highlight here are “Search Impr. Share” and “Search Exact Match IS”.
What is the difference between those fields?
The first, “Search Impr. Share” will show you what you qualified for – out of the total available impressions. For example, if your keyword got 300 impressions over two days and your impressions shares were 50% — that means that your keyword was actually searched 600 times during that period of time. “Search Exact Match IS” shows the percentage of time your ad was shown compared to the number of times you were eligible. You should look at both “Search Impr. Share” and “Search Exact Match IS.”
The things that will impact how your program performs are budget, approval status, and quality scores – those aspects will impact whether you are showing or not. If there is no data shown for specific terms, that means there is not enough data in the history.
We hope you find this addition to your toolkit for Google Adwords helpful.
Stay tuned as we cover other enhancements that Google has made to GDN to help optimize your campaigns.