When looking for useful data to analyze how your Google AdWords search campaign performed this month, Search Impression Share (SIS) is one of the most underutilized search metric results.

But, what many people don’t know is that search impression share is one of the most important metrics to monitor because it determines how often your ad shows up when someone searches for a certain keyword that matches your category.

That said, you can compare how many times your ad appeared to the ads that got your customers to click on it. By comparing these two, you’ll be able to determine if you need to make improvements in your ad copy, improve and A/B test your landing page or adjust your keyword bidding by removing or adding relevant search keyword or phrases so that you can increase the quality score of your search keywords.

In technical terms, search impression share (SIS) is defined as ” a percentage-based metric calculated by the number of impressions you have received, divided by the approximate number of impressions you were eligible to receive. ” For example, a 100% SIS means your advertisement showed every time it was eligible to be displayed, while a 10% SIS means that your ads did not show 90% of the time. An SIS of 100% rarely happens, but is possible with an infinite budget and killer ad copy. Usually, an average search campaign runs with an approximate of 20% SIS.

In order to maximize good results for your search impressions, keep a close eye on these following metrics should you ever need to adjust your budget:

• Click-Through Rate (CTR) – Keep an eye on this metric always. If your CTR is not 2% or higher (for Search campaign) and 0.90% or higher (for Display etwork campaign), do not increase your budget. What you can do instead is to find out what seems to block the users from not clicking further to conversion. Whether it’s slow website loading speed or difficult user experience, fix the problem as soon as possible so that your paid ad campaigns will not suffer along with it.
• Conversion Rate – If your CTR is not performing well, then this metric will suffer too. Keep in mind that your conversion rate must always be higher than 1%.
• Targeting – Keep in mind to target only specific areas. Having a broad targeting actually increases your bidding budget and might not even guarantee you a high conversion rate. If you really want to create different targeting, you can create different search campaigns with different targeting and test it out for a month on a limited ad budget and see which one has better results. From there, you can narrow down your targeting and effectively distribute your budget.
• Quality Score – The ideal quality score should be more than 5. Make sure that all your ad copy, website landing page, and keywords are relevant to one another.
• Bid – When it comes to bidding, start out with a moderate budget before jumping on to strategically allocating your budget on keywords that generate a good amount of impressions, clicks, and conversion.