What is impression share?

Impression share is the percentage of times your ad was shown out of the total number of times it was eligible to show. If your ad was eligible to appear on 1,000 searches in a given week and it actually appeared on 600 of them, your impression share is 60 percent.

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Google Ads calculates this metric for search campaigns, shopping campaigns, and Performance Max, and splits the missing share into two causes: lost impression share due to budget (you ran out of money to serve more ads) and lost impression share due to ad rank (your bid or Quality Score was not high enough to win the auction).

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Impression share matters because it tells you whether you are capturing the full demand available for your keywords or leaving traffic to competitors. A campaign with 20 percent impression share is invisible to 80 percent of the people searching for what you sell, regardless of how well your ads convert on the clicks you do get. For B2B paid media specifically, impression share is the metric that tells you whether your budget ceiling or auction competitiveness is holding back growth.

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