What is Target Impression Share?

Updated March 4, 2025

Aim at the Target

Having spoken about AI earlier in the week, we’re back looking at the robots again today with Google Ads new smart bidding strategy. Google have been using AI to help their PPC customers get the best value for money, or performance, for some time now, so it’s an exciting time when they announce a new smart bidding strategy; target impression share.

Smart Bidding

Google’s smart bidding strategies aim to take some of the guesswork out of PPC bidding. Using the data that Google collects about your account, and how your ads perform, the automated bidding tools aim to second guess the system and put your ads in the best position possible.

Cost per acquisition is a long-standing smart bidding option offered by Google. The idea of CPA is that you input what you are willing to pay for a conversion, and then Google will use that as an upper limit for your bids. Then it will move your ads up and down the page as it sees necessary until it gets you your conversion. However, for CPA to work you need to have been running ads for a certain amount of time, and have a high enough volume of conversions for Google to be able to make the assumptions needed to run the algorithm.

Target Impression Share

The new smart bidding strategy focused on impressions over conversions, and is aimed users that want their ads to show at certain places on the SERP. You have three options of where your ads can show:

1. At the top of the ad section
2. In the top ad section
3. On the front page

With this strategy you can also decide how often the ad is shown in certain auctions. For example it can show 100% of the time or 50% of them. The idea of target impression share is to increase brand awareness. So it’s perfect if you’ve launched a new product line, or changed your brand name and you want to make sure that it is seen by as many people as possible.

Testing, Testing, 1, 2 ,3

What do you think of Target Impression Share? Have you had a chance to test it out with your Google Ads account? We’d love to hear what you think of the new smart bidding tool.