How much of your marketyou never even showed up for.
Impression share is the slice of the auction you actually appeared in. The rest went to competitors while you watched. This tool splits the gap into the two leaks that cause it — budget and rank — and shows you the real clicks waiting on the other side of each one.
Your numbers
How many times your ads actually showed in the period.
The full auction you could have shown in — your impressions plus everything you missed.
Share you missed because the budget ran out. Pulled straight from your 'Search lost IS (budget)' column.
Share you missed to low Ad Rank — weak bids or Quality Score. From 'Search lost IS (rank)'.
Clicks you got from those impressions — sets the CTR we project recovered clicks at.
The verdict
Impression share
40.0%
Extra clicks — recover budget
750
If you buy back the share you lose to budget, at your current CTR.
Extra clicks — fix rank
450
If you lift Ad Rank to win the share you lose to low rank.
Impressions missed
60,000
Total addressable auctions you never showed in.
Click-through rate
3.0%
Clicks ÷ impressions — the rate we project recovery at.
Share you're losing
60.0%
Where the auction goes
Your share on the board
Your bigger leak is budget — you win the auction but run dry. That share is bought back with money.
Reverse-solve · hit a target impression share
Impressions to add
30,000
Clicks that buys
900
Going from 40.0% to 70% means winning 30,000 more impressions — about 900 extra clicks at your 3.0% CTR. Decide how much of that gap is budget you can fund versus rank you have to earn.
Diagnose · budget vs rank
Which leak is worth closing first?
| Leak | Share lost | Impressions | Clicks you'd win | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Budget | 25% | 25,000 | 750 | More budget / pacing |
| Rank | 15% | 15,000 | 450 | Bids + Quality Score |
Same gap, two fixes. Your bigger leak right now is budget, worth roughly 750 clicks — buy that share back with budget before you touch bids.
Reference · impression-share bands
How to read your number
| Band | Range | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Mostly absent | 0–34% | You're invisible more than you're present. Fine for broad terms, costly on money keywords. |
| Contested | 35–49% | You show up half the time. A coin flip on whether the buyer ever sees you. |
| Present | 50–69% | Reliably in the auction. Healthy for mid-intent terms; push higher on your converters. |
| Strong | 70–84% | You own most of the demand. The target for high-intent, high-margin keywords. |
| Dominant | 85–100% | Near-total presence. Watch cost — the last points are the priciest you'll ever buy. |
Rule-of-thumb bands, not benchmarks. The right target is set by the intent and margin of the keyword, not by a single number — own your converters, don't chase share on terms that don't pay.
Your move
You can see the gap. I can tell you which half is worth closing.
40.0% impression share — 1,200 clicks/period waiting in the 60.0% you're missing.
Send me the account behind these numbers. I'll separate the share you're losing to a thin budget from the share you're losing to weak rank, tell you which one is actually leaking money, and show you the cheapest clicks to win back first. Free, and the plan is yours either way.
Plain English
Impression share is your attendance record for the auction.
Impression share is the percentage of the auctions you were eligible for where your ad actually appeared. A 40% impression share means that for every ten times a buyer searched a term you bid on, you only showed up four times. The other six belonged to someone else — usually a competitor, often by default.
What makes the metric useful isn't the headline percentage. It's the breakdown. Google splits the share you lost into two buckets: lost to budget (you ran out of money before the day was over) and lost to rank (your Ad Rank was too low to clear the bar, so you didn't enter the auction at all). Those two leaks have completely different fixes, and confusing them wastes money.
This calculator takes those exact columns — your impressions, the eligible total, and the two lost-share percentages — and converts the abstract percentages into clicks. Because a 25% impression-share gap doesn't motivate anyone, but '300 clicks a month you're handing to the competition because your budget caps out by 2pm' tends to.
The formula
Impression share = Your impressions ÷ Eligible impressions × 100
40,000 impressions out of 100,000 eligible = 40% impression share, so 60% of the market went elsewhere. If 25% of the total was lost to budget, that's 25,000 impressions you could buy back; at your current 3% CTR (1,200 clicks ÷ 40,000) that's ~750 extra clicks. The 15% lost to rank is another 15,000 impressions, ~450 more clicks — but those you earn with bids and Quality Score, not budget.
What a healthy impression share looks like
Aim to dominate the terms that actually convert, not every term you can technically match. Below ~50% impression share on your money keywords, you're invisible more often than you're present; on broad or low-intent terms, a low share can be perfectly rational. Treat these as rule-of-thumb bands, not gospel — the right target is set by intent and margin, not by a single number:
| Band | Range | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Mostly absent | 0–34% | You're invisible more than you're present. Fine for broad terms, costly on money keywords. |
| Contested | 35–49% | You show up half the time. A coin flip on whether the buyer ever sees you. |
| Present | 50–69% | Reliably in the auction. Healthy for mid-intent terms; push higher on your converters. |
| Strong | 70–84% | You own most of the demand. The target for high-intent, high-margin keywords. |
| Dominant | 85–100% | Near-total presence. Watch cost — the last points are the priciest you'll ever buy. |
Rule-of-thumb bands — not a published dataset. The right target is set by the intent and margin of the keyword, not a single number. Own your converters; don't chase share on terms that don't pay.
Your impression share is low. Which leak is it?
Lost IS (budget) is the bigger number.
You're winning the auction but running out of money. The ads work; there just aren't enough hours of them. Raise the daily budget on the campaigns that already convert, or shift spend off underperformers into them. This is the leak you fix with a credit card.
Lost IS (rank) is the bigger number.
You're not even entering the auction often enough. Ad Rank is too low, which means bids, Quality Score, or both. Raise bids on high-intent terms, tighten ad-to-keyword relevance, and improve landing-page experience. Money alone won't fix this one — relevance will.
Both are high and clicks are tiny.
The account is starved on every front. Don't spread a small budget across everything; concentrate it on a handful of high-intent keywords, win those auctions decisively, then expand. Partial presence everywhere converts worse than full presence somewhere.
Impression share is already high (80%+).
You own this market. Chasing the last few points gets expensive fast — the final 10% of share often costs more than the first 50%. Pour the next dollar into a new keyword set, a new geo, or AOV before you bid up auctions you already dominate.
How to win back the share you're missing
01Read the two lost-IS columns first
Before you change anything, look at lost IS (budget) vs lost IS (rank). They point at opposite fixes. Acting on the wrong one is the most common impression-share mistake.
02Fund your converters, starve the rest
Most accounts cap budget on campaigns that print money while leaking it on ones that don't. Move spend toward the keywords with proven conversions before you ask for more budget.
03Raise bids on high-intent terms
Lost-to-rank share on bottom-funnel keywords is the cheapest share to buy back, because those clicks convert. Bid to win the auctions that matter, not the ones that don't.
04Lift Quality Score to lower the cost of share
Better ad relevance and landing-page experience raise Ad Rank without raising bids, so you win more auctions for the same money. Quality Score is the lever that makes share cheaper.
05Tighten match types and negatives
Broad match can inflate eligible impressions with junk, making your share look worse than it is. Cut irrelevant queries so your share is measured against demand you actually want.
06Schedule budget to peak hours
If you lose share to budget by mid-afternoon, you're absent when buyers search after work. Dayparting and pacing keep you present through the hours that convert.
07Don't chase 100%
Total impression share is a vanity ceiling. The last points are the most expensive and least profitable. Target the share that maximizes profit, not the share that maxes out the bar.
08Segment share by device and geo
A 60% blended share can hide 30% on mobile where your buyers actually are. Break it down before you decide you're fine.
The vocabulary
- Impression share (IS)
- The percentage of eligible auctions where your ad actually appeared. Your impressions ÷ the impressions you were eligible for.
- Eligible impressions
- The total auctions you could have shown in, given your keywords, targeting, and approval status. The denominator of impression share.
- Lost IS (budget)
- Share you missed purely because your budget ran out. Fixed with money — more budget or smarter pacing.
- Lost IS (rank)
- Share you missed because your Ad Rank was too low to enter the auction. Fixed with bids and Quality Score, not budget.
- Ad Rank
- The score that decides if and where your ad shows: roughly bid × Quality Score plus expected impact of extensions and context.
- Quality Score
- Google's 1–10 rating of expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing-page experience. Higher QS means higher Ad Rank for the same bid.
Impression share questions, straight answers
On your high-intent, money keywords, aim for 70%+ — below ~50% you're missing more auctions than you win on terms that actually convert. On broad, low-intent, or top-of-funnel terms, a lower share (even 20–40%) can be perfectly rational, because winning every one of those auctions would cost more than it returns. There's no single right number; it's set by intent and margin.
Keep going
A calculator tells you what. A call tells you what to do about it.
Send me the account behind these numbers. I'll tell you straight where the money's leaking and what I'd fix first — free, and you keep it whether you hire me or not.