What is “Click Share” in Google Ads?

April 24, 2019

In this blog I’ll be going over one of the newest competitive metrics that Google released by Google Ads, click share, and a few things you can do to improve it.

click share

Click Share Defined

Click share is the estimated percentage share of all available clicks that your ads received during a given time period. It is only available for shopping and search campaigns. For example, if you had 20 clicks and your estimated click share was 20%, there were another 80 clicks which your ads could have received. I’ll go into more detail later in the blog on how you can improve your Google Ads account and capture a higher click share percentage.

In order to estimate click share, Google Ads analyzes auctions over a set time period, this is set by whatever date range you select within the Google Ads UI, and looks at all auctions in which your ads appeared on as well as all auctions in which your ad competed in and did not appear.

Google does need an undisclosed amount of clicks in order to estimate a click share percentage, and when there aren’t enough you will simply see a ”–” in the report. Therefore we recommend looking at longer (at least a week) periods of time unless your campaigns receive enough traffic to see click share at the daily level.

click share metric

You can add the click share metric to your columns within the Google Ads UI for search campaigns at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level. For shopping campaigns, you can add the click share metric at the product group, campaign, ad group, or at any shopping attribute level (item ID, brand, category, etc.).

click share column

How to increase your click share

One way to increase your click share estimation is to make your ads more relevant to a user’s search. Ultimately, a higher CTR helps click share. Having relevant headlines 1, 2, and 3 will increase the likelihood of your ads being clicked on. With catchy description lines that make strong claims about your products or services offered, users will also be more inclined to click on your ad. We at Four15 Digital recommend testing a new headline or description at least once a month to find new variations of ads that users may be more inclined to click on.

Another way to increase the relevance of your ads is to make sure you ad extensions are as specific to the user’s query as possible. Refer to our blog why we need to customize ad extensions.

For shopping campaigns only, you are allowed to have multiple ads appear per query. If you have multiple products that fall within the same category it’s encouraged to have them all as part of your Google Shopping Feed to increase the likelihood of your ad being clicked.

click share percentages

The new click share metric is another tool in which you can see if you’re getting the most out of your ads. A low click share would show that you have room for more optimizing and testing ads, bids, and extensions in order to achieve the most amount of clicks possible.

Pro tip: segment your data by day or week and see how click share has changed over time to see if your optimizations are making a positive impact.