Display IS
How much of the Display inventory you were eligible for you actually won.
What it means
Display IS is the share of impressions you won on Google's Display Network out of the impressions Google estimates you were eligible for, shown as a percentage. Search and Shopping sit outside it entirely. It's an auction measure, not an audience one: 40% means you appeared in 40% of the eligible placements, not that you reached 40% of anyone.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Display IS = Display impressions you won ÷ the Display impressions you were eligible for. The denominator is eligibility rather than a count of anything that happened, and it comes to the app as Google reports it — so read the trend and treat the decimal place as approximate.
Campaign rows only. Impression share is a campaign-level figure, so the Campaigns table carries it and the Products, Search Terms and Countries breakdowns don't.
The total row is weighted, not averaged. The summary line weights each campaign's share by its cost, so a big spender pulls it further than a small one. Averaging the column by hand will not reproduce it.
Worked example. Google estimates your Display campaigns were eligible for 500,000 impressions in March and you served 90,000. Display IS = 90,000 ÷ 500,000 = 18%. The other 410,000 were placements you qualified for and somebody else filled.
It answers the question
Is there more Display inventory available to you? A low figure means the placements ran without you; a high one means you've taken most of what your targeting allows, and further growth has to come from widening it rather than bidding harder.
Why it matters
It's a headroom reading. Every other column on the Campaigns table describes traffic you bought — this one describes traffic that existed and went to somebody else, which makes it the honest test of whether more budget would find anything at all.
It also stops a Display figure being read as an account-wide one. A store leaning on Search can sit near zero here and be in perfect health, because the column is reporting on a network it barely uses.
What good looks like
There's no published band for this, and 100% isn't the target — the last slice of any auction is the dearest and usually costs more than the sales it brings. Judge it against your own trend, and only after deciding whether Display is a channel you're trying to grow at all. Where it matters, read it beside Cost/Conv.Cost/Conv.What each Google sale costs you. on the same row: coverage is worth buying when the sales it produces still pay, and worth nothing when they don't. And read it beside Search ISSearch ISSee the full entry. for context, remembering the two describe different networks bought on different terms.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Feed the campaigns that run out of money | Raise daily budgets on the Display campaigns whose spend hits the cap before the day ends | Display IS up within days | 3–7 days | Cost/Conv. usually gets worse first — the placements you gain are the ones you were previously outbid on, and they were priced that way for a reason. |
| Fast Stop being eligible for what you don't want | Exclude the sites, apps and content types taking budget with nothing to show for it | Display IS up with no extra spend | 1 week | You raised the share by shrinking the pool, not by winning more. Impressions and conversions fall with it, and one broad exclusion can remove placements that were working. |
| Slow Raise the bid where the sale still pays | Lift targets on the Display campaigns whose cost per sale sits comfortably under what an order contributes | Higher coverage at a higher price per click | 2–4 weeks | Avg. CPC rises across the whole campaign, including the placements you were already winning, so sales get dearer even where nothing changed. |
| Slow Give Display a campaign of its own | Split Display delivery out of a mixed campaign so its budget and bids are yours to set directly | A Display IS you can actually move | 1 quarter | The pooled budget stops drifting to whichever network is working that week, and a smaller standalone campaign takes longer to tell you anything reliable. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Coverage tells you the room available. The price of a sale tells you whether the room is worth taking.
More placements, cheaper sales
You took more of the network and each sale still got cheaper. Usually a targeting change that found better inventory rather than a bidding win.
You bought the coverage
Expected when you scale Display. The question isn't whether sales got dearer, it's whether they're still under the ceiling you can afford.
Small and efficient
Cheap sales on thin coverage. There is inventory running without you and the economics say you could afford some of it.
Losing ground and paying more
Less of the network and a worse price for what you did win. Outbidding your way out of this is the most expensive option on the table.
Read them per campaign, not as a pair of account totals. A Search campaign has no Display placements to have won and a Display campaign has no Search auctions, so a row showing one and not the other is telling you what that campaign is, not that data is missing. Where a campaign serves both, the gap between them shows which network your budget is actually reaching.
Together they say whether the budget is the ceiling. High Cost against a low Display IS means you're spending hard and still missing most of the inventory, so the targeting is too broad or the bids too low. High Cost against a high Display IS means you've taken most of what's there, and the next euro buys worse placements.
Common misreads
You're missing 88% of the placements you were eligible for, and a great many were never going to buy anything. Impressions aren't people, and one person can be several impressions.
Only if the campaign is capping out. When you're losing on rank instead, more money buys the same rate of losing with a bigger invoice.
Impression share is reported per campaign, so only the Campaigns table carries it. A blank elsewhere is the design, not a gap in the data.
Also called
Display impression share · content impression share · Display Network impression share
See yoursYour Display coverage per campaign, beside the Search IS and cost per sale on the same row.
Open Google Ads →