Google Ads bringing click share to Search campaign competitive metrics

Click share is rolling out for Search campaigns in Google Ads.

To help advertisers get a fuller sense of how their text ads are performing, Google is bringing the click share metric to Search campaigns.

Why you should care

Represented as a percentage, click share is an indication of how many clicks your ads received out of the total number of times Google estimates your ads could been clicked. It helps show how effectively your ads are engaging users compared to the competition. Impression share, on the other hand, shows how effective you’ve been at getting your ads shown to users.

Click share has been available in Shopping campaigns for several years. Why Shopping first? Chiefly, because there is no average position calculation in Shopping campaigns. As Google’s Matt Lawson pointed out in his column on click share in Shopping campaigns a couple of years ago, “it delivers the type of insight that you’re used to receiving from average position in your Search campaigns.”

Average position, however, has become less and less useful with the removal of right rail ads. Depending on the number of ad slots available, an average position of 2.5 might actually mean the majority of your ads displayed at the bottom of the search results page, for example.

You might recall, Google recently introduced four new ad position metrics to help bring more clarity to ad performance relative to the actual position ads appear on the search result pages. “Contrary to common perception, average position is not meant to describe where the ad appears on the page. Average position reflects the order that your ad appears versus the other ads in the ad auction,” Google explained at the time.

Click share is a competitive metric that can help advertisers get deeper insights than average position is able to provide. Impression share and click share work well tandem. A high impression share and low click share, for example, likely indicates your budget and bids are plenty high but that your ads are not resonating with users as well as your competitors’.

More on click share

• Google has started rolling out click share to accounts, and product manager Pallavi Naresh said it will be available for all Search campaigns in the coming weeks.
• Click share will be available at the campaign, ad group and keyword levels.
• Naresh said advertisers should continue to use click-through rate to analyze ad copy performance relative to other ads and to use click share to view “click growth opportunities with more extensions or bid or budget increases.”