As Napoleon Bonaparte said: “Strategy is the art of making good use of time and distance. Distance can be recovered, time never.”
If we try to apply this thought to the strategy we implement every day in Google Ads, we can realize that as marketers we should never leave opportunities for brand awareness or lead generation on the table, but should instead always take advantage of every opportunity that becomes available in the market.
And to be ready to seize every opportunity, we must always be present. Make good use of our time: understood as our time of visibility to our targets. Understood as the time in which our brand can be visible, clickable and reachable by our targets. And this is even more true for B2B.
The 95:5 Rule in B2B Marketing
In a fun marketoonist cartoon (always brilliant), the main problem of B2B marketers regarding how they use their visibility time is visualized in one frame: the 95:5 Rule.
In 2021, Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute introduced the 95:5 Rule: a simple but powerful concept that challenged conventional thinking in B2B marketing. In his research, Dawes demonstrated that up to 95% of buyers are not “in market”, therefore not ready to purchase at any given moment and perhaps won’t be for months or years. This goes against the “short-term” sales approach still adopted today by much of B2B advertising, which seeks to generate immediate leads.
If we accept the 95:5 Rule as an assumption, then as marketers we should cultivate long-term brand building instead of seeking immediate results. And put this way, it would seem that lead generation shouldn’t exist, but perhaps it’s just a cognitive bias that has spread.
If indeed everyone can agree that creating a brand, like maintaining it, is composed of many factors that must work in unison over time, perhaps someone is still convinced (the bias) that lead generation is an immediate activity. They believe it’s a sort of instant win.
It’s not.
Lead Generation is Work Over Time
Lead generation in B2B is in fact the result of activity over time: which produces its fruits when brand awareness meets the moment of the spark between supply and demand. In other words, when market positioning meets the need.
Because everything in marketing takes time. Especially in search marketing where intent, the query, is the heart of everything. And you need to know how to play your cards at the right time. Harvest your work at the right moment because, to quote Napoleon again: “Every tree produces its fruit, and you only reap what was sown.”
Search Impression Share: The Key Metric
This is where Google Ads comes into play with the Search Impression Share metric.
If we reflect on the Search Impression Share metric, we will realize how much it is a key metric to act directly on both variables: brand awareness or market positioning and the moment of the spark between supply and demand or the need.
Search Impression Share in Google Ads, by its definition, is nothing more than a percentage metric that indicates how many times ads were shown compared to the total number of times they could have been shown.
In other words, it measures actual visibility against potential visibility on Google’s search network with a very simple formula:
Search Impression Share = (Impressions Received / Potential Impressions Available) × 100
Connecting this simple formula with the 95:5 Rule, with the concept of time expressed by Napoleon at the beginning of this article, and with brand awareness or market positioning and the moment of the spark between supply and demand or the need, we could conclude how necessary it is to generate value in B2B to be constantly present for your target.
You need to be there. Constantly. Always.
And this brings us back to Search Impression Share.
Search Impression Share is therefore the key metric to know how much potential market and in what time frame you are intercepting. The higher it is, the more likely it is that at the moment in time (Napoleon dixit) when the buyer will be in market (95:5 Rule), because a need has arisen (spark between supply and demand), there will be a high possibility of lead generation.
Lead generation which in turn will be facilitated, at the appropriate moment described above, if for a long time the target has had visibility of the brand. If long-term brand building has worked correctly, it will in fact be a facilitating variable for lead acquisition.
How to Interpret Search Impression Share
A high Search Impression Share (e.g., 80% or 90%) indicates that ads are appearing in the vast majority of relevant searches. A low Search Impression Share (e.g., 30%) means you are losing a large amount of visibility and potential clicks.
If we then consider how most campaigns don’t reach 20% Search Impression Share and, on many occasions, not even 10%, we immediately understand where many B2B marketers are going wrong.
It is therefore, as mentioned, a two-phase job. A high percentage of Search Impression Share helps over time to build brand awareness, while at the same time a high percentage of Search Impression Share is necessary to intercept with higher probability the moment (Napoleon) when the buyer will be in market (95:5 Rule) because a need has arisen (spark between supply and demand).
Vehnta Software: The Tool to Maximize Search Impression Share
A useful tool to achieve high Search Impression Share rates is Vehnta Software.
This is because it allows B2B companies to direct their Google Ads directly to specific companies, moving away from generic targeting. By advertising to prospect companies, metrics tend to be higher as the budget is optimized to its objective and there is no waste of resources.
Google Ads campaigns generated with Vehnta Software have this important characteristic: to focus heavily on the time and space in which a brand must have visibility directly to its targets.
This concept is so rooted in Vehnta that even the product dashboard places Search Impression Share among the most important metrics. In Vehnta Software, a user can choose to target over 500 million companies worldwide and optimize their visibility to be as much as possible in the mental shortlist of their buyers.
Creating Your Own Opportunities
Because to return to the core concept of Napoleon’s quote that opens this post, we can say that the Search Impression Share metric is a matter of time and not space. Of opportunity. Of opportunities to seize. And to seize the opportunity you must be there: be present. Always. Or at least as much as possible!
Because, after all, to quote Napoleon again: “Ability is of little account without opportunity.”
And opportunity must be created, because in conclusion, always quoting Napoleon Bonaparte, we could close by saying that a well-reasoned strategy on Google Ads is the way to make things happen: “Circumstances? What circumstances? I make the circumstances.”
It’s the same in search marketing.
Marcello Cazzaniga
Executive Director & Founder
