Google Adwords just added a status in the Keywords tab called “Low share of voice”. This is in the same place where you would be told if your keyword was “below the minimum first page bid” or “low search volume”.   What exactly does this mean?

Currently, you can run a report in Adwords to find out some pretty valuable information.  Share of Impression a.k.a. Share of voice. What does that mean?  Let’s look at this example:

  • Campaign is set to California only
  • Keywords include dark red widget, red widget, and burgundy widget
  • Today, there were 5,000 searches for any of those keywords or broad variations of those keywords.
  • Your campaign had 1,000 impressions and 50 clicks.

Calculations:

  • Click-through-rate = 50 clicks / 1,000 impressions = 5%
  • Share of Impressions (Share of voice) = 1,000 impressions / 5,000 searches = 20%

OK…. why do we really want to know the share of voice?  Well, it’s the possible searches that you did not qualify for.  You may have been restricted by your budget, quality score (rank), or by exact match.  By this calculation we know that there were 4,000 possible customers that didn’t see our ad.

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