Google Ads Metrics

We’ve provided a few recommended metrics below that should help guide you in your Google Ads analysis and optimization efforts.

Unlike other paid media platforms, Google Ads' performance is more dependent on campaign structure and competitive performance. Additionally, most metrics on Google Ads are vanity metrics. They look great on the surface but provide no real value to your strategy.

We’ve provided a few recommended metrics below that should help guide you in your analysis and optimization efforts.

Recommended Reports

The Auction Insights report

Presents a detailed table displaying your performance in comparison to your competition.

In the table, you can compare ad positions and metrics like “Position above rate” which shows how often your competition outranks you. These metrics are great for knowing when you need to increase bids or quality scores and attempt to overtake your competitors in rankings.

“Outranking share,” tells you how often your ad was shown higher than their ad. If it’s low, you likely aren’t bidding enough or have worse quality scores than your competition.

Utilize this report every week to see fluctuations and if your efforts to increase bids or improve ad relevance are working.

The Keyword report

Here you can analyze each keyword you currently bid on with your existing campaigns and ad groups. Look at key metrics like conversions, cost per conversion, and conversion rates first.

Are specific keywords converting better than others? Are keywords converting well but too expensive? Reduce their budget and put your budget into keywords that are converting cheap but don’t have as many total conversions. The Keyword report is an excellent tool to help you decide where your bid and budget adjustments need to be to improve performance.

Competitive Metrics

With competitive metrics, you can easily evaluate the performance of your campaign. Find out what your campaign’s potential is compared to competing advertisers, and whether you can actually realize that potential. If not, they indicate where the problem might be.

In addition, these metrics will alert you if you’re losing impressions due to a low budget or poor Ad Rank. So, apart from your campaign’s potential, you can estimate its limits.

Competitive metrics available to you:

Search/Display impression share

Impression share is the % of impressions your campaigns/ad groups/keywords receive and the total estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. That is, % of cases where your ad succeeded in the auction. Estimated impressions are calculated based on several factors. These include quality, approval statuses, and targeting settings.

Search Exact match IS

Impressions you received by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive for search terms that exactly match your keywords, respectively their close variants. Unlike in the previous one, this metric is not available on Shopping or the Display Network.

Search/Display Lost IS (based on the budget)

The metric represents % of the time that your ads weren’t running because your budget was insufficient. If this percentage is high, you should consider raising your budget to make your ads more successful in the auction. Since it works with the budget, this metric is only available at the campaign level.

Search/Display Lost IS (based on rank)

This is the percentage of ads that didn’t run due to a low Ad Rank in the auction. Your goal should be to keep this percentage as low as possible. If it's high, you’ll need to adjust your campaign to get a higher ranking.

Ad Rank is awarded by machine learning, but also by people. The key factors for ranking include, for example, as relevant ad copy as possible, or the landing page to which your ad links.

All impression share metrics are updated twice a day and are reported separately for each campaign. As you can see, they can provide you with information about the market and competition. They will help you define your advertising deficiencies and identify issues that may be behind your ad's poor performance. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you follow them.