If you’ve ever managed a paid search advertising campaign, you know there’s a huge amount of data that can be used to measure the success of a campaign. Most advertising campaign managers focus on ROAS (return on ad spend) but the ad impressions metric also plays a significant role in pay-per-click campaigns.
The goal of all advertising efforts is to obtain a high return on investment, but ROAS shouldn’t be the only metric of success. Brands also need to keep track of the ad impressions, which measures the amount of exposure you’re receiving from shoppers. By watching both ROAS and ad impressions, campaign managers can more fully measure the efficacy of ad campaigns.
Why Impressions Are Important
Ad impressions are valuable to brands because it measures how often ads are served for the search terms triggered by shoppers. Campaign managers who want to increase brand recognition will want their ads to be served more frequently.
To find this metric, take a look at the keyword level view of Sponsored Product or Headline Search Campaigns.
How to Analyze Ad Impressions
The more specific the keyword is, the higher you want your impressions to be. Specific keywords tend to be far more descriptive and deliver more targeted traffic for qualified shoppers. Low ad impressions will cause an increase in click-through rates (CTR), depending on if you’re able to get enough qualified shoppers to see your ad. Campaigns with low CTR’s indicate a lack of relevance for your ad viewers, who aren’t prompted to click on your ad to learn more about your products.
Ad impressions are also a great indicator of the strength of your campaign’s keywords: If you have a very high impression share for your keywords, you can feel confident that your exposure is high. It also helps guide you to expand your keyword list through Amazon’s search term report or encourage you to add more negative keywords to improve the relevance of your campaigns.
Ad impressions also help identify areas of missed opportunity due to budget limitations: If you have a high performing campaign that is missing out on impressions due to budget constraints then you can easily increase budgets to gain additional conversions for qualified shoppers and overall campaign performance.
As impressions an important metric to track in paid search advertising. With these metrics in mind, you can get a clear picture of where your campaign stands, and how you can improve its performance. If you need any help with your paid search strategy, we have a team of experienced PPC professionals ready to manage and optimize your AMS campaigns.
