How Do You Improve Impression Share and Top of Page Rate? [Part 2]

In part 1 of this article, I discussed why impression share and top of page rate are important when measuring the success of your Google Ads. Now let’s talk about how to improve them and which factors you need to move the needle.

First, let’s start with Impressions Share. How do you increase this number?

Google gives some tips, and I will summarize:

Increase your campaign budget: This one is obvious. Increasing the budget will make a huge impact on your impression share. You have to be careful here not to get into a bidding war and blow your budget.

Increase your bid: Raising your bid will also give you more impression share. Also, keep in mind your budget and acquisition cost goals when making an adjustment.

Decrease regional targets: If you decrease regional targets you will be much more targeted, which is usually the best strategy. However, this can decrease the number of impressions available to you. ( < Some of Google’s wording to get you to spend more money)

Re-adjust your budget: If you increase your regional targets, you may see a decrease in impression share. You can avoid this by re-adjusting your budget so that it covers the cost of your new campaign settings.

Improve your ad quality: This pertains to the keywords, content, and call-to-action you are using. Ad quality relates to quality score, which I will discuss more in depth later.

Next, let’s discuss Top of Page Rate. Top of Page Rate is critical because you want your ads to appear as close to the top as possible. There a few primary factors to increasing this related to Ad Rank, which is how Google ranks your ad.

The first variable here is a quality score, which relates to ad relevancy. Achieving a good quality score is the best course of action and the most cost-effective. Your ad content needs to match your page content if you want to increase your quality score. For example: If your ad focuses on a lawn fertilizing service and the content on the page you link to focuses on shrub trimming, then you will have a very low-quality score. The same will happen if the page content is primarily focused on cutting lawns and barely mentions the fertilizing service. You would want the page to be explicitly focused on the fertilizing service. Ads need to be as closely aligned to the content on the page as possible, and the more granular you can get, the better-quality score you will have.

The second variable here is Max CPC (cost per click). There is a variety of bidding strategies to force Top of Page Rate by spending more money. I won’t go into great detail here and let me explain why. I prefer the first strategy of working on the quality score because I believe in getting the best ROI possible when doing any type of digital advertising. If you force these rankings and the content on your site is not aligned with the ads you have built, then you will have a lower conversion rate. This will cause you to spend more money for each sale or lead. Why would you want to waste money? I would focus on quality score first and when you get that aligned, then you can start increasing and optimizing your bidding strategy.