how to get more impressions in google adwords and its pros and cons

Google Adwords is a web analytics software from Google which allows you to track and monitor your website statistics. Adwords Impressions are the number of times your advertisement was displayed to the user or appeared on the screen. It could have been displayed on the Google search result page, on a Google content network page or any other site on the Google network. Each rendering of the ad is counted as one impression, so a page refresh could end up being counted as two impressions and so forth.

With the advent of Google Instant Search functionality, the impression count gets a little more difficult to keep track as the search result page is constantly changing as you type. In Google Instant, an impression is counted only if the ad is shown for at least three seconds or if the user gets out of Google Instant by clicking anywhere on the page or by selecting a drop down query suggestion.

The Adwords impression count is a crude number that denotes the reach of your campaign and keywords. You can find the impression count from the Google Adwords user interface for your campaigns, ad groups and even down to each of your keywords.

Increasing your Adwords impression count is a major factor in Adwords advertising as it represents increasing and expanding the reach of your marketing efforts and targeting more customers. It is also one of the easiest to improve on when compared to increasing the efficiency of other factors such as the CTR, Quality Score and landing page quality.

Even though it is the one of the easiest things to do, there are also some disadvantages associated with increasing the adwords impressions….if done blindly. Depending on the campaign and marketing requirements, you might be better off increasing one or more of the other statistics before increasing the impressions itself.

Make sure that you are effectively optimized for the impressions you are currently getting before deciding on increasing the adwords impressions for other keywords. This depends on a case to case basis and your Google Adword manager or consultant would be a good resource, if you cannot analyze it yourself.

Disadvantages

  1. It costs to advertise more and Adwords is no exception. Unless you have an unlimited budget, this could end up costing more and giving you a worse return on investment (ROI).
  2. It could cause a decrease in click through rate (CTR), which will affect your quality score and CPC adversely.
  3. The increase in clicks or visits may not be high quality visitors and may not convert well.

Assuming that you have thoroughly analyzed your statistics and came to the conclusion that you have to increase the impressions to be successful, there are several changes you can do to your Adwords campaign. First find keywords in your current campaigns that has a low impression share (IS). These are the ones which have the highest potential for more impressions. Keywords that already have a high impression share may not be worth pursuing.

More (related) keywords

Consider adding new keywords, long tail keywords and key phrases that relate to your current list. This will increase the adwords impressions for your ad group and campaign. As long as the new keywords are related to the current set and relevant to the ads you are running in the ad group, it should net more impressions without the loss of the ad score.

Increase bid amount

Increase the bid amount for the keywords. This will not only allow it to rank higher but also break into the first page of the search results for which you were not currently ranking. This is especially true for broad based queries where the search query can differ quite considerably from the matched query. Obviously this will increase the overall cost of your marketing and hence you should increase the budget accordingly, otherwise you might actually end up with less number of clicks than before.

Higher budget

Your campaign might be running out of budget, in which case increasing the overall budget for the adwords campaign will net more adwords impressions. This can be done without increasing the bid amount itself. Google Adwords will notify you of your insufficient campaign budget if you are consistently running out, so it should be pretty easy to figure out.

Adwords Impression: Limited by Budget

Broad searches

Convert your exact match and phrase match keywords to broad based searches. This will allow them to match against a much broader set of search queries and increase the number of impressions.

Google Adwords impressions: Broad match type queries

Enable Display Network

If you have not enabled the display network for your ad groups or campaign, then enabling them will bring hordes of impressions, but usually with a much lower CTR. I have noticed that enabling display network will take up to a week to fully bring in the impressions, so be patient.

Optimize other factors

This is not easy or quick by any means, but increasing and optimizing other factors in Adwords such as the Click through rate (CTR), Ad Score and Quality Score will actually increase your impression share, as Google algorithms detect that your campaign is much more relevant to the keyword than your competitors’.

Following through with one or more of the above steps should increase your adwords impressions substantially, use them wisely according to your marketing budget.