With a view to charging advertisers based on the location where they want to display their ads, Google has launched a unique bidding strategy called as ‘Target Impression Share’. Advertisers who wish to display ads at the very top of the page can bid higher and secure this placement. Other than this, advertisers can also look at placing their ads on the top half section (above the organic search results) or at random placements across the search engine results page.
As Google puts it, Target Impression allows an ad to show in a certain percentage of eligible auctions. The working behind the premise is simple yet clever. Google is the universal leader in search engines. More often than not, people begin their online information discovery journey through a Google search query and its associated results page. So, bidding helps Google award premium ad placement for higher bids and thus allows marketers to get total value for every advertising dollar spent by their brand.
How can marketers use it?
This is the fifth strategy brought out by Google to enable smart bidding for marketers. The target impression work at a campaign level. Hence marketers and PPC experts need to include only those keywords that are meaningful and relevant to their specific campaigns. The next step would be to configure the impression share percentage target. This number can go as high as 100%. Google suggests against going too low with the bidding targets as this miscalculation can severely limit the bids needed to reach the goal.
Marketers are given the option to set one of the three placement options for their ads:
1 – Absolute top (1st position in search rankings)
2 – Top of the page (Position is above the SEO backed organic search rankings)
3 – Any random position in the page (Position will be anywhere within in search results page)
When marketers select 100% as the percentage of eligible auctions in which the ads need to be shown, the underlying meaning behind the term is simple – they want a particular ad to be shown 100% of the time their business is searched for. To accomplish this, marketers can set the Target Impression Share to 100% and the system will then display their ads on 100% of the ads of the campaign.
Marketers can use Target Impression as a single/ stand-alone strategy or use it within multiple ad campaigns. It will be especially useful if you want your brand to rank well for local searches. This will align well with the reporting changes made by Google last week, where it introduced performance reporting for position metrics in the interface.
For marketers looking to maximise the revenues from their paid ad campaigns can look at utilising the Target Impression bidding programme. This way, they can score better than the competition in terms of search ads impressions. Let us know how you would be tweaking your paid ad campaigns in light of this new development made by Google.
