Impressions - AdWords vs Analytics

[englebert]

Given AdWords is a paid service, you'd hope the figures are accurate. For an example (exact match) keyword last month, AdWords says there were 14,253 impressions on Google search (i.e. not search partners or display network). However, going over to Analytics, for the same month it suggests 4,500 impressions for the same keyword.

Google AdWords says the following about impressions:

"An impression is counted each time your ad is served on Google's ad networks, such as on Google.com or other publisher websites and apps."

"...How often your ad is shown. An impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a search result page or other site on the Google Network."

Google Analytics explains impressions as:

"The number of times any URL from your site appeared in search results viewed by a user, not including paid AdWords search impressions."

Can anyone help clarify what is an accurate way of attaining monthly search figures, i.e. what is my overall potential Google customer base? I've also tried the Keyword Planner - which averages monthly searches  - and it gives me 18,100 impressions for the same keyword (almost the two above figures added).

Thanks! Rob

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Rob

The difference is one of your results is paid impressions and the other is organic impressions. So you are seeing two reports for separate things - keyword planner will give you an idea of the overall potential.

Essentially your site appeared in the organic results 4500 times (remember this is the number of times a page from your site appeared in the results for that term and was seen by the user/searcher not the total amount of times it was searched).

Paid ads appeared 14253 times.

Hope this makes sense

Matt

[ClaytonJ]

As Matt indicated very difficult to compare as it is rarely apple for apples.

An exact impression match would not be the same, unless in the same position & it appeared at the same time - which is impossible. It is a rare a paid ad appears every single time a page is searched and certainly not in the same spot. Organic again has its weakness, as the page may not be optimized for search - hence reading its impressions might not be beneficial as being accurate.

I am not sure you can choose anything as accurate as such, but often after we have optimized a page we get more impressions for that keyword - than say what semrush states. We use semrush as the target and try not to settle for less than what they state we should achieve. Most of the time it works.   WMT's is now the best way to measure impressions as it has redacted the double up count, where two urls' or more appeared on the same page.

What does WMT's state for impressions? In short to answer your question however use keyword planner or semrush as your base.