Is your business taking advantage of Google Ads for marketing?
Google Ads offers a variety of competitive metrics that let you compare your Google Ads results with competing companies’ performance. These competitive metrics help you understand your marketing results in relation with other businesses’ performance and how other companies’ Google Ads’ campaigns are affecting yours.
Below are five Google Ads competitive metrics you should use:
Click Share
Click share is an estimated share of the number of clicks you have generated compared to the all possible clicks you could have gained, based on your bidded keywords.
For example, if you received 100 clicks and your click share is 10%, this means that the total eligible number of clicks is 1,000.
Use this metric to see if you need to increase bids or budgets or add more extensions to generate more clicks. For example, if your click share is on a downward trend in the last six months from 50% to 20% while your monthly budget remains the same, it could be because more advertisers are bidding on the same keywords you’re bidding or other advertisers have increased their monthly budget. The increase in the number of advertisers for your targeted keywords or other advertisers’ ad budgets boosts the total number of clicks your ads are eligible which ultimately reduces your click share. To remain competitive, you’d need to increase your ad budget.
This feature is available only for Search and Shopping campaigns.
Search Lost (IS) Rank
This is the percentage of time your ad didn’t appear because of poor ad rank, which is a value that determines your ad position.
Ad rank is calculated by the multiplication of your bid amount and your ad’s quality score. An ad’s quality score is calculated based on an ad’s expected click-through rate (CTR), ad relevance, and landing page experience. The more relevant your ad, the higher your ad’s CTR, and the better your landing page experience is, the better your quality score. A higher quality score leads to a higher ad rank. That said, the opposite is also true.
If your ad has a poor ad rank, your ad may not appear for related search queries. This lost in appearance is shown in Search Lost (IS) Rank.
For example, if your Search Lost (IS) Rank is 30%, this means that 30% of the time when customers search for queries that match your bidded keywords, your ads aren’t showing because of your poor ad rank.
To improve your ad rank, first improve your ad quality score by optimizing the CTR, landing page experience, and ad relevance.
Search Lost (IS) Budget
This metric shows the percentage of time your ad didn’t show up because your budget was too low. For example, if your campaign Search Lost (IS) Budget is 30%, it means that 30% of the time your ad didn’t appear because your budget was too low.
This metric lets you assess if you need to up your daily or monthly budget and gain more search clicks.
Display Impression Share
This metric shows the percentage of impressions that your ads have received in comparison to the total number of impressions your ads could have generated or also known as eligible impressions. Eligible impressions are calculated based on your targeting settings such as age groups, audiences, and geographic locations.
A 30% impression share means that you have received 30% impressions out of the eligible impressions.
Use this metric to determine if you need to increase your bid or budget so you can gain more impressions based on your targeting.
Display Lost IS (Rank)
This metric shows the percentage of time your ads didn’t appear on Google’s Display Network because of poor Ad Rank.
To improve your ads’ Ad Rank, use the recommendations suggested in the Search Lost (IS) Rank section.
By using the five competitive metrics above, you can compare your Google Ads performance with companies in your industry. You can also use the metrics to determine if you increase your ad budget or Ad Rank, improve the ad copy to better the CTR, or optimize the landing page experience. Implementing these changes will surely improve your Google Ads performance and help you achieve your marketing objectives!
