As Google Shopping is growing into a larger marketplace, we merchants, agencies and alike require more comprehensive tools to further improve our advertising efforts. It’s therefor great to see that a new feature has been added to Google Adwords which allows us to see your top position percentage.
Before we begin, this feature is only available in Google Adwords New UI, if you do not have the feature already, you can become one of my clients, and I will enable this feature for you.
You can activate the new UI, if you have the feature enabled by clicking on the blue button in the bottom right corner “Try the new Adwords beta”
What info is available?
The new metric allows you to see how often your ad is in the absolute top spot. The absolute top spot as seen in the image below, is the position you can get in Google Shopping Search carousel.
This means the absolute top spot metric does not look at Shopping results, only Web search carousel results. Below you can see the difference between the Web search results and Shopping search results. The images shown are for desktop, but the same applies for mobile devices.
How is the metric calculated?
Absolute top impression share = absolute top impressions / total eligible top impressions, it works similar to impression share.
For example if you had the absolute top position for 5 out of 30 times, than your absolute top impression share is 16%
This means that your ad was often appearing at the top position.
Where can we see the metrics?
You can view the metrics in Campaigns, Ad Groups, Product Groups and Products by adding the column Search abs. top IS, found under Competitive metrics.
You will than see something similar as in the image below.
How can we utilize this metric
This feature is great to push products in the top position by analyzing both impression share lost and absolute top impression share. For example if you have a sale or seasonal product, then it is great to bid higher for these products to ensure top position.
Do keep in mind of your return of investment, being number 1 does not translate to profit. Advertising has a lot of moving parts and focus on return of investment is the first and most important element of success.