Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 81- The New Impression Share

You may have seen people saying that Google Ads now allows double serving, but this is not true. And it's also not completely false. 

Today, we're diving into what you need to know about this policy update, what it means for your Impression Share, your campaigns, and how to continue to drive excellent results from your Google Ads investment. 

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you. 

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 81: The New Impression Share.

Our first question comes from mohamedabdelkaleq4957 on YouTube, and they say, is there a method to discover the impact of double serving on my Impression Share? 

So Google recently announced that there is a “Top Auction” and an “Other Auction.”

You used to only be able to show one ad on a page at a time, but now these two auctions are essentially considered two separate pages. You can show an ad in Top and an ad in Other. To be clear, this is not double serving.

Double Serving is a policy violation where you try to essentially circumvent systems so you can show multiple ads on the same page. Or now that would mean multiple ads in Top or multiple ads in Other. You do this by starting a second Google Ads account advertising the same domain and you try to get multiple spots. That is not allowed. It has never been allowed. It is still not allowed. It's called the Unfair Advantage policy.

Anyway, although this is not technically double serving now when you have an ad in Top and an ad in Other, that's what the industry is calling it because to the end user, that's what it's like: you're serving two ads on a page. We’ll go with it.

Semantics aside, what does this actually mean for you?

There are three important things I want you to know about this. 

First, you can segment your campaigns to be able to see your Top performance and Other performance.

To do this, in your Google Ads account, in your Campaign view, for example, you tap the Segment button and then choose Top versus Other. Then it'll add a bunch of rows. You can see your impressions, clicks, cost, et cetera, from Google Search Top, Google Search Other, Search Partners Top and then Search Partners Other.

While Google has never explicitly verified this, it is my belief that Google Maps is included in Google Search Network. And Google Shopping is confirmed to appear there as well.

Let me give you an example of what this performance difference could look like. This is just from one Google Ads account. So when we look at Google Search Top versus Google Search Other, we see a click-through rate of 13% for Google Search and a click-through rate of 0.5% to 1% for Google Search Other. So that's why people kind of hate this.

Of course, you want to appear on the top, that's where most of the clicks happen. Segmenting your data like this is important because if you just look at the campaign overall, for example, this campaign says it has a 7.4% CTR, which is objectively a great click-through rate for a Search campaign. But the segment shows that actually when the ad shows at the Top, it's a 12.5% click-through rate. And when it shows at the bottom, it's only 1%. So breaking it apart like that gives us that interesting insight.

While the click-through rate difference is vast, I want to tell you that all the other metrics are pretty much the same. For example, the CPCs in Top versus Other are within a few cents of each other. The conversion rate of Top versus Other is very similar. And the CPA, which is what this campaign is optimizing for, is again within $1 of each other at Top versus Other.

And that's the important thing here. I know it can feel stressful, like, “I want to make sure my ads only appear at the top.” You don't need to worry about it as long as performance is similar, which if we think about it rationally, it should be. You don't pay for impressions on Google Search, you pay for clicks.

The second thing I want to point out is the difference between Search Impression Share, Search Top Impression Share, and Search Absolute Top Impression Share.

These definitions haven't changed. The Search Impression Share is: of all the times your ad could have shown on the page, how often did it show? Now we know that that means it could have shown the Top, could have shown at the bottom, could have shown on both, but as long as it's on Google Search, not Search Partners, Search Impression Share is how often you showed an ad. 

Search Top IS is: how often you show at the top of the page? And then Search Absolute Top IS is: how often you were the very first ad? Not necessarily the very first thing on the page, because that could be in the AI Overview or that could be Local Services Ads. (We're getting to those next.) But the top Google Search ads are all columns you can add to your reporting and they have not changed.

The third thing I'll say is that if you are still very concerned about this and you only want to appear at the top, you can use Target Impression Share bidding to do so. 

You can bid for Impression Share or Top Impression Share or Absolute Top Impression Share. By bidding for only Top or Absolute, you'd ensure your ads are only showing at the Top and not in Other. 

Again, I am not saying that I recommend this as a strategy. I'm just sharing this with you in case it's something you want to do.

For more about Target Impression Share bidding and all the other bid strategies in Google Ads, you can check out Episode 77 of this podcast.

And if you want to dive under the hood of your campaigns to solve challenges like this and see what's really going on with your Google Ads, you can book a call with me. I've had more than 500 different coaching calls since I started my business. And before that, I worked at Google for six years and saw more than 10,000 different ad accounts. I feel pretty confident I can help you solve whatever Google Ads challenges you're facing.

You can book a call with me via my website, jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L dot C-A, or follow the link in the episode description.

Our second question today comes from king_needs_an_insta on Instagram. And they say, I own a local financial advice practice. The SEO and Google guy I use says local services ads are the only way to promote. Do you think he's right? Is PPC basically dead due to LSAs pushing sponsored ads down to the bottom of the page?

First, no, PPC is not dead. Just like the death of SEO has been greatly exaggerated, so has the death of PPC. 

Second, LSAs or local services ads are a kind of PPC.

And third, sponsored PPC ads, aka Search ads, aren't necessarily at the bottom of the page if LSAs show up, but they do show below the LSAs. At least, I've never seen an example of Search ads showing above LSAs.

But first things first, LSAs, local services ads, what is that? 

This is a special type of ad for local lead generation businesses like lawyers, roofers, locksmiths, et cetera. It is a pay per lead program rather than a pay per click program. And they are quite complex, but can also be quite effective. As of right now, this is only a thing in the U.S., but I would expect LSAs to expand to other countries at some point. They're always adding new industries too. 

So now to the question, are LSAs the only way to promote your business if you are in an LSA industry? No, but it's a good idea to test them out. I have observed that when LSAs show, you can expect a lower CTR on your Google Search ads. The LSAs are just so prominent. They're so user friendly. They steal a lot of that click share.

I have Google Ads coaching clients that are in LSA industries but not running LSAs, and they're still able to get good results, so it's not required. But the clients I have who are running both LSAs and Google Search ads, I would say they're generally happier with their Google Ads results. So take that for what it's worth, my anecdotal observations. The thing is, LSAs can get really expensive really fast. So if you're like a $50 a day kind of advertiser, you're not ready for LSAs.

While I'll be the first to admit I am not an LSA expert, I asked Anthony Higman, arguably the world's top LSA expert, to teach me how to create and optimize local services ads from start to finish. He shared an in-depth 90-minute LSAs masterclass with me, and you can catch the whole thing in my Inside Google Ads course. That's included for my course members at no additional cost because I want to ensure I'm bringing the most up-to-date, advanced knowledge you need to manage Google Ads effectively. Catch Anthony's LSA Masterclass, plus more than 100 Google Ads tutorials with me in Inside Google Ads at learn.jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A or follow the link in the episode description.

Our final question today comes from Emilio Escayol on YouTube and they say, I've got some underperforming B2B Search campaigns. My goal is to increase Impression Share and lower the very high CPCs. What would you recommend? Broad Match and targeting audiences or Exact Match and observation audiences? 

Let's break this down. Emilio says the goal is to increase Impression Share and to decrease CPCs. So I'm going to say right away that you can't have your cake and eat it too. You're going to have to prioritize.

As we spoke about in Episode 68, there are just four ways to increase Impression Share. 

1. Increase your budget

2. Increase your bids

3. Increase your quality score

4. Decrease your targeting

To be clear, Impression Share is a tool to use to improve performance, but Impression Share itself is not something to optimize for. A higher Impression Share doesn't mean better results, but if you want to grow your business, Impression Share can help you determine the best way to do that.

Back to Emilio, he wants to increase Impression Share and decrease CPCs. That means increasing bids is out. I'm going to assume that we're not willing to just increase the budget because the campaign's underperforming. So that leaves increasing quality score or decreasing targeting. 

With option one, we can target Broad Match keywords with audiences on targeting. So the audiences on targeting will absolutely decrease our targeting because we're telling Google we only want to show an ad if the user's search matches our admittedly broad keywords and they match to one of our audience selections. Because we're leveraging Broad Match, we should see lower CPCs, although the audience targeting could bring CPCs up a bit. That may net out as a wash, but it should increase relevancy, help our click-through rate, and help quality score.

This sounds like a good option, provided we have sufficient budget and proper full funnel conversion tracking to get Broad Match working. And, provided we aren't so restrictive with our audiences that there won't be sufficient volume for all this AI to learn.

Option two is Exact Match keywords with audiences on observation. Since the audiences are on observation, they'll have no impact on performance. So this is really asking: are Exact Match keywords the better way to go? Going with Exact rather than Broad will limit our reach. We will likely see higher CPCs though, since these will likely be higher intent, higher quality, more niche queries. But similarly, that should bring us higher CTR and higher quality score, which is also a good option.

To sum up, I can't tell Emilio which is better without seeing the account because it depends, but here's what it depends on: available search volume and budget and bid strategy. So here's how I would think through picking.

If our Impression Share is currently very low, like less than 10%, then I'd probably start with Exact Match keywords. That will help me narrow in, get a higher share of the impressions I know I want, potentially pay more per click, but feel confident that those are good quality clicks. 

However, if our Impression Share is very high already, like 40% or 50%, and I want more, then I would go with Broad Match plus audiences because I need to open up the pool of available queries. I'm getting close to maxed out. But as I'm opening up that pool of queries, I want to be more conservative by using those audiences as a filtering mechanism. 

Thanks for this question, Emilio. It was almost like a bonus Insider Challenge.

Speaking of which, today's Insider Challenge is this. Let's say that you go to check your Top versus Other Impression Share, and you find that more than half of your Search Impressions are coming from Other, not Top. What do you do? 

The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real life Google Ads problem solving.

Last episode's challenge, Episode 80, was this. Let's say that you started working with a client who has a $20 a day Search campaign set up with hundreds of Broad Match keywords, Search Partners turned on, no negatives, no assets, mediocre ad text, but to their credit, conversions are set up correctly and they're using Max Conversions and performance is pretty good. Would you leave the current setup or would you change it up?

This is a real scenario that has actually happened to me multiple times over the years as a Google Ads coach. And I'll say, sometimes I've gotten them to narrow things right down to Exact Match and negatives, to get our control. Sometimes I haven't.

So the first thing I would do is see if we have enough data to switch from Max Conversions to Target CPA bidding. Bet you didn't think I was going to say that, right? 

Do I usually recommend turning Search Partners off? Yes.

Do I usually recommend that small budget advertisers use Exact Match rather than Broad Match keywords? Yes. 

But why? If you want to get really good at Google Ads, you can't just spout out best practices or quote, “Well, here's what Jyll said to do.” You need to understand the why, the reason why we do these things, and the reason why I generally turn off Search Partners, and I generally recommend Exact Match for small budget advertisers, is because they usually don't spend enough money to collect enough data to make these things work.

In this scenario, the campaign has been running for a long time. And while it probably performed very poorly initially, it's performing pretty well now. It has learned. So let's continue leaning into automation since we know that's how we're going to help businesses thrive going forward. 

To be clear, I see far more clients like this who come to me with this scenario and performance is bad. In that case, 100% of the time, it's going to be Exact Match, Search Partners off, et cetera. But with this more of a rare scenario, where performance is pretty good. I'm leaning into automation. Let's go with it. Leveraging Target CPA rather than Max Conversions will help us get a handle on efficiency. It will open up proper Impression Share metrics. It will give us more control over costs. 

Then the next thing I'd work on with them is ad creative, improving their RSAs, adding a bunch of assets like image assets and callouts and sitelinks. I'm not talking about ad strength here, by the way. That's an arbitrary metric. I'm talking about writing words that are compelling and interesting and will grab attention on the search engine results page. Check out the last episode for more practical tips on how we do that. 

Third, I would check the Search Terms report, but not to play whack-a-mole with negatives. The fact that we're getting good results means we're showing on relevant searches. Of course, I would confirm that, maybe add a few negatives, but I wouldn't go crazy. We're leaning into automation, helping it out by giving it better creative and a more specific bid strategy to let things improve from there. 

What about you? Would you do the same thing or something different? 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.