We have just discovered that Google has released impression search statistics in their accounts today.

How does Impression Share reflect on my campaign’s performance?

Impression share is a metric available at the campaign and account level for search.

* Campaign: If an advertiser has more than one campaign competing in the same target market, the resulting impression share for any one campaign won’t be penalized if it loses an impression opportunity to another campaign from within the same account.
For example, let’s say Campaign A and Campaign B both belong in the same account. Out of the ten potential impressions, Campaign A shows twice, and Campaign B shows five times. A competitor takes the remaining three impressions . A campaign-level report will show an impression share of 40% for Campaign A (2/(2+3)) and 63% for Campaign B (5/(5+3)).
You can see that the impressions Campaign A lost to Campaign B is not factored in to the denominator when we calculate Campaign A’s impression share. This example illustrates that it is a lost opportunity for your campaign only when the competitor wins the remaining potential impressions.
* Account: Reports at this level will not penalize your impression share from the competition across all your campaigns.
Let’s take the same example from above. An account-level report would show an impression share of 70% ((2+5)/(7+3)) for the entire account. If you look at the denominator, you can see we factor in only the impressions you’ve won across all your campaigns (Campaign A and Campaign B) plus the opportunities that were lost to outside competition.

This will (with further understanding) certainly help clarify if Search Affiliates do better job than Search Agencies. There has always been uncertainty from the merchant side, with this data – there can definitely be closer relationships between both Search Affiliates & Search Agencies (or worse, who knows!).

My belief is that through the use of Search Affiliates (direct linking), we will now be able to quantify the benefit that we offer to a larger range of merchants, than our existing clients. The ultimate aim for any merchant will be to get 100% impression share, and given the sheer volumes of keywords and variables (bids x keywords x positions and then some) that are out there, I don’t think it’s possible for just a single company to be able to achieve this. Search Affiliates will be an even more vital part of the Search Marketing ecosystem going forward!

Kudos to Google on this move and providing the market with more information – I think it’s a very positive move especially for Search Affiliates!