Google Ads seems like it will not be adding Search Impression Share reporting to Performance Max campaigns any time soon. Google’s Ginny Marvin confirmed that “auction insights and click share reporting in PMax only include Search network.” She said she agrees that “click share & Imp share measure diff things & correct that Auction Insights can’t be paired with performance metrics,” on Twitter. Ginny said there are no plans to add these reporting metrics to PMax.

Mike Ryan posted about this on Twitter, here he asked, “Will search impression share become available for PMax campaigns?” “It’s such a valuable metric for understanding headroom,” he added.

Ginny Marvin responded, “Hi Mike, While there aren’t plans to surface IS, Click Share https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6299696 and Auction Insights https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/11372871 can help you understand PMax headroom on the Search network. This is also a good look at using Insights for PMax https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/12769923?hl=en.”

Ginny added, “To confirm, the auction insights & click share reporting in PMax only include Search network. Agree Click share & Imp share measure diff things & correct that Auction Insights can’t be paired with performance metrics. So why the change? Two points: 1. PMax & Smart bidding are focused on delivering marginal ROI rather than maximizing impressions. 2. Turns out aggregate imp share across Search & Shopping isn’t particularly insightful bc Shopping has many more imp slots beyond the visible carousel.”

Mike Ryan told me that back when PMax launched, it definitely didn’t have feature parity. For example the lack of item ID reporting, missing metrics including Search Impression Share and Auction Insights, and lack of key dimension reporting like asset groups. A lot of those parity issues have been fixed, such itemID, auction insights, asset groups. But search impression share is a hugely popular KPI, Mike told me. And it is still missing and confirmed that it is not coming back any time soon by Ginny Marvin of Google.

Here are the tweets on this topic:

Hi Mike, While there aren’t plans to surface IS, Click Share https://t.co/ffwhkwYmiq and Auction Insights https://t.co/gtbzFSf7gX can help you understand PMax headroom on the Search network. This is also a good look at using Insights for PMax https://t.co/BuJU1uP0qK.

— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) May 2, 2023

IS is my fave metric, I’m with you Mike I miss it too

— Ben Kruger (@Ben__Kruger) May 3, 2023

I’m not saying it can perfectly capture your full
PMax inventory, but every bit of data helps. And we are typically seeing 80-90% of PMax is Shopping-based anyway, so, definitely valuable info

— Mike Ryan (@mikeryanretail) May 3, 2023

Two points: 1. PMax & Smart bidding are focused on delivering marginal ROI rather than maximizing impressions. 2. Turns out aggregate imp share across Search & Shopping isn’t particularly insightful bc Shopping has many more imp slots beyond the visible carousel. /

— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) May 3, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.