Interpreting Search Term Reports

Search term reports allow you to see every search term that triggered your ad and received clicks. Whether your ad is triggered depends on the search term a user enters when searching on a site within the Google Network and on your keyword matching settings.

In particular, this report can help you:

• Select the appropriate match type (e.g. broad, phrase, exact, or negative) for existing keywords.
• Identify new keywords you may want to add.
• Identify existing keywords you may want to delete.

Interpreting Impression Share Reports

Impression share is a metric available at the campaign and account level for Google Search Network and Display Network.

• 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.

Exact Match Impression Share
Exact match impression share reports the impression share of your campaigns as if your keywords were set to exact match. Since keyword match type can affect your impression share, exact match impression share can help you determine your share of voice for just the specific keywords you are targeting without requiring you to make adjustments to your campaigns.

For example, one of the reasons why you may have low impression share is because you're not showing on broad match keywords. Exact match impression share tells you how your keywords would perform if they were all exact matched, so that you can determine whether or not match type is a cause for low impression share. This lets you rule out match type and focus on other possible factors when you are working to improve your impression share. This feature is available as a column option in the Dimensions tab. Data is available for search campaigns.