In today’s article, Google Ads Target Impression Share Best Practices, I will show you some of the best practices and what you need to know about target impression share, including what it is, how it works, when to use it, and most importantly why you should not use it.

 

Watch the video version of this article below:

Target impression share best practices and how it works

This strategy is a smart bidding strategy in Google Ads. That means it’s automated and you’re giving control of the bidding to Google.

TSI or Target impression share will allow you to select a specific percentage of times that you want your ad to show in specific spots in Google search results for your specified keywords.

This bidding strategy is very useful when you absolutely have to have your ads ranking in the very top spots of Google.  You have 3 options you can select from:

 

1. Absolute top of page
2. Top of page
3. Anywhere on the page

You can choose a % of how often you want that spot.  It can be from 1% to 100%.

The absolute top of the page is the #1 spot. You’re telling Google you want to be on that spot, regardless and you give Google the freedom to adjust your cost per click (CPC) whatever it takes to win that spot in the auction. Top of page cost a little less and anywhere on the page even less.

If your brand needs to be on the #1 spot and you have the budget for it, then Google Ads target impression share is a great way for you to buy brand awareness, visibility, and dominance in Google Ads, by ensuring that your target impression share is the spot you want.

Let’s say you set your target impression share to the absolute top of page 90% of the time, Google Ads target impression share machine learning will do what it takes to put you there and keep you there.

You can set Google Ads target impression share at the account level for all campaigns or if you want to save money you can only set it for a specific campaign.

 

How To Setup Target Impression Share Bidding

To update your bidding strategy to a Google Ads target impression share:

• Go to Google Ads campaign dashboard and select the campaign you want to update for the bidding strategy.
• Click Settings. Within the settings section, head over to the Bidding section and click the dropdown option.
• To change the bidding strategy, click the link that says: Change bid strategy.
• Click another link that says: select a bid strategy directly.
• Once that is clicked, you will see all the list of bidding strategies on the dropdown.
• Select and click target Impression share from the option.
• Once selected, you can then customize your target impression share with the following options:
  Where you want your ads to appear
  Percent impression share to target
  Maximum CPC bid limit
• Click save.

 

When do you use Google Ads target impression share

This bidding strategy is a good strategy for branding, wherein you want to appear your ads well for branded keywords like your brand name or for keywords that speak your brand.

However, if your goal is conversion, then this strategy may not work well for you since this strategy is just about showing your ads whenever the user performs a search of your target keywords.

If you want to try this for your campaign, I would suggest testing first before running a full campaign for this bidding strategy. Like I always advise for bidding strategies, the only way to know if this strategy works well for you is to run a test campaign and from there you can decide if this strategy is for you or not.