Google is releasing new functionality for AdWords that is aimed at helping them better allocate their budgets. The new feature will give advertisers impression share metrics down to the Ad Group level.

Previously, impression share metrics were available only at the campaign level, which didn’t help when advertisers were trying to determine which particular ad group should be allocated more budget.

“Today you know that your campaign overall is profitable and you know that it has ‘runway’ but when you get down to the Ad Group levels you don’t know much,” Jon Diorio, product manager at Google, told Search Engine Land.

In the Ad Groups tab, advertisers will now be able to see:

• Impression share: the percentage of impressions received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to get
• Lost impression share (Rank): the percentage of impressions lost due to Ad Rank. If you were budget constrained — if your budget, rather than your bid price or quality score was keeping you from getting more impressions — this won’t be shown.
• Exact match impression share: the share of impressions you received for searches that were an exact match for your keyword divided by the estimated number you were eligible to receive.

Google is also updating the algorithms it uses to calculate these impression share metrics, so it will update all existing campaign-level information back to May 2011. Advertisers won’t be able to see impression share data prior to that time.

All of the impression share metrics will be updated only once a day, around noon Pacific Time, so advertisers will have to wait until after noon Pacific to get full data from the previous day.

The Ad Group impression share metrics will begin being rolled out on January 30 to all advertisers globally, and will probably be released to everyone by the first few days of February.

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords

About The Author: Pamela Parker is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and Executive Features Editor at Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker. See more articles by Pamela Parker

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