Google Impression Share Disappointment

Have you had success improving your Google Adwords impression share?

We haven’t.

We’ve followed the guidelines and implemented their optimization suggestions and still our impression share is at 43%.
According to Google our losses are due to “Rank” not budget.
We are using 300+ negative keywords to weed out any irrelevant search queries and our campaigns are made up of 12 to 40 adgroups each focused on 1 or 2 keywords.
Our other stats in general seem good; Avg. position 1.5, a 2.5% CTR and a 3% conversion rate.
Our goal is 100% impression share, or very close to it, so how do we achieve this?

Questions:

1. Is Google’s impression share a reliable metric?
2. What is considered a good impression share?
3. What activities should you focus on to improve impression share?
4. Does Google provide you with vague unclear answers when discussing impression share?

*Other KPI’s such as CTR, Conversions and Cost Per Conversion are just as important if not more important than impression share but our goal/focus at this time is to see improvements with our impression share.

Our daily budget is more than half the amount we currently spend.

Look forward to reading your comments.
Thanks for your time.

From Google's Help Center:

What are ways to improve my Impression Share?

To increase impression share for your campaign, your ads must appear either more often or in more places. The following lists tips on how you can achieve a higher impression share:

-Improve ad quality.
-Increase the campaign budget – it's important to remember that the budget controls how often an ad is shown.
-Increase your bid.
-Adjust keyword match type
-Adjust keyword match type
-Adjust regional or placement targeting parameters.
--Regional and placement targeting act as filters for where an ad can show
--If you increase your regional or placement targets, remember to consider readjusting your budget so that it will cover the costs of your new campaign settings
--If you decrease your regional or placement targets, you may see an increase in impression share – but keep in mind that the size of the “pie” has been reduced

What is Impression Share Exact Match?

Impression Share Exact Match 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, Impression Share Exact Match 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. Impression Share Exact Match 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 under 'Level of Detail' when you run an Account or Campaign Performance report. Data is available for search campaigns only.

HTH,

dburk