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5 Ways to Maximize PPC Impressions

It’s exciting to have a client with a virtually unlimited budget. But every effort has its unique obstacles, and limited impression share is a big one for aggressive advertisers.

Usually in PPC, the goal is to get the best return from a limited budget. But when you get a client whose goal is to dominate the market and get as much profit as possible by spending as much as possible, you run into the problem of limited PPC impressions.

If you haven’t struggled to get more impressions before, here are a few pointers:

  • Budgeting more than you can spend does not guarantee your ad shows 100% of the time
  • Only one ad per account can show for any one keyword
  • AdWords’ Double Serving policy is fairly clear but they reserve final judgment on a case by case basis

Just Maximizing Spend Does Not Get You All The Impressions in the World

This can be baffling to clients. “You mean we’re spending as much as they’ll let us, and they aren’t showing our ads every time anyone in the world searches for our keywords?” Yes, that’s what I mean. We’ve seen accounts only receive 20% of available impressions for their favored keywords despite an unlimited budget.

“Why can’t we get more impressions?” Well, no matter how much money you have, you’re not the only advertiser in the world, and Google is trying to show everybody’s ads. They’re also trying to maximize their earnings. I suspect this is about more than just CTR and CPC, possibly yet another mysterious Google algorithm.

5 Ways to Maximize PPC Impressions

There are a few more ways to maximize impression share (the % of all available impressions for the keywords you’ve chosen) besides increasing your budget:

  1. Ad Quality: This is about quality score, which is really about CTR, which is really about choosing the right keywords, creating granular ad groups, and write and testing good ads. Negative keywords help. Keywords in ads help.
  2. Accelerated Ad Delivery: This option is found in Campaign Settings. AdWords doesn’t guarantee you’ll get all your impressions if you use the standard delivery rate. Accelerated increases the likelihood you’ll spend your daily budget every day. For more, see Google AdWords Help : Which ad delivery option is best for my campaign?
  3. Increase your bid: This is one contributing factor in ad position. AdWords gets squirrelly on the phone when you try to nail down whether or not higher ranking ads get more impressions.
  4. Adjust keyword match type: Broad keywords generate more impressions than phrase, and phrase more than exact. Broad keywords are not such a big relevancy risk if you use negative keywords. And the advertiser who’s looking for market dominance might not mind some of the realities of expanded broad match.
  5. Adjust regional or placement targeting parameters: Although query parsing may make your ads available beyond your geotargeting, geotargeting definitely limits impressions. Relax these, or at least create complimentary campaigns for other geotargets then optimize your spend across them.

In my next post I’ll talk about double serving and other ways to get more impressions for your target keywords.

Brian Carter is the Director of Search Engine Marketing for Fuel Interactive, an interactive marketing agency in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He is responsible for the SEO, PPC, SMM, and ORM programs at Fuel and its partner traditional agency Brandon Advertising & PR.

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Brian Carter The Carter Group

Brian is author of The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money With Facebook and Facebook Marketing: Leveraging Facebook’s Features For ...

5 Ways to Maximize PPC Impressions

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