How many enquiries is your budget leaving on the table?
Google already tells you what share of the available searches you showed up for, and why you missed the rest. Put those three numbers in and this converts them into the enquiries you did not get, and what the ones you could actually buy would cost.
Your numbers
The answer
Enquiries lost to budget
31.1
About $2,800 to buy them, worth $11,200 of work
Enquiries at full coverage
88.9
Against 40 today
Total enquiries missed
48.9
At 45% impression share
Lost to ad rank
17.8
Not buyable with budget
Jobs missed to budget
9.3
At 30% closing
How this was worked out
- Enquiries at full coverage
- 40 ÷ 45% = 88.9
- Missed
- 88.9 − 40 = 48.9
- Share of the loss that is budget
- 35% ÷ (35% + 20%) = 63.6%
- Lost to budget
- 48.9 × 63.6% = 31.1
- Cost to capture
- 31.1 × $90.00 = $2,800
What each step toward full coverage would add
| Impression share | Enquiries | Extra vs today | Extra spend at today's cost per enquiry |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60% | 53.3 | 13.3 | $1,200 |
| 70% | 62.2 | 22.2 | $2,000 |
| 80% | 71.1 | 31.1 | $2,800 |
| 90% | 80 | 40 | $3,600 |
These rows assume the extra impressions convert as well as the ones you already win and cost the same per enquiry. Neither holds in practice — the later fifth of an auction is the dearest and the least relevant — so read the table as the optimistic edge of the opportunity.
What to do with this
- Roughly 31.1 enquiries went to somebody else because the budget ran out. At $90.00 each they would have cost about $2,800 to buy — which is the number to weigh against the $11,200 of revenue they represent at your close rate.
- Another 17.8 sit behind ad rank. That half is not for sale: it moves when the ad matches the search better and the page delivers what the ad promised. Money spent trying to buy it lands as a higher cost per click across the whole account.
- Raise the budget in steps of about 20% and give each step three weeks. A large jump changes the auction you are competing in as well as the amount you spend, and you lose the ability to tell which caused what.
Change anything above and the link in your address bar changes with it, so you can send the exact result to whoever needs to see it. Nothing you type is sent anywhere — the whole calculation happens in your browser.
What this does, and how the maths works
What it does
- Scales your current enquiries up to what full coverage of the same searches would have produced.
- Splits the gap into the part you lost to budget and the part you lost to ad rank, because only one of them is for sale.
- Prices the budget-attributable half at your own cost per lead, so the answer is a spend decision rather than a statistic.
How to use it
- In Google Ads, add the columns Search impression share, Search lost IS (budget) and Search lost IS (rank) to your campaign view for the same period you are reporting on.
- Enter all three, plus the enquiries and cost per enquiry for that period.
- Read the budget-attributable line. That is the only part of the gap a bigger budget will close.
- Ignore the rank-attributable line as a spending decision — it is a relevance and quality problem, not a funding one.
The formula
- Enquiries at full coverage = enquiries ÷ impression share
- Missed enquiries = enquiries at full coverage − enquiries
- Budget-attributable = missed × lost-to-budget ÷ (lost-to-budget + lost-to-rank)
- Cost to capture = budget-attributable × cost per enquiry
Reading the answer
- Lost impression share to budget is the clearest buy signal in a Google Ads account. It means the auction was there, you qualified, and the money ran out.
- Lost impression share to rank is not solved with money. It is bid, ad relevance and landing page — and raising bids to fix it raises the cost of every click you were already winning.
- Full impression share is almost never the goal. The last 20% is the dearest and least relevant fifth of the auction, and it will drag your cost per enquiry up with it.
What it cannot tell you
This assumes the impressions you missed would have converted at the rate the ones you won did. They would not — the searches you lose on rank tend to be the ones you match worst. Read the answer as a ceiling on the opportunity, not as a forecast.
Where every figure on this page came from
Every default in the calculator above is either your own number or a figure from one of the studies below, with the market and the sample stated. Nothing here is an estimate somebody felt was about right, and no United States figure is wearing an Australian label.
This tool cites no third-party figures. Every input is your own, which means the answer is only as good as the numbers you put in — and that nothing here is a benchmark dressed up as a default.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about working with SoudCoh
Have more questions? Let's chat!
Book a Free Strategy CallThere is no published figure for this in any market and we are not going to make one up. What the number tells you is more useful than a target anyway: if your lost impression share to budget is large, the auction wanted to show your ads and the money stopped it, and that is a straightforward buy. If it is small and lost-to-rank is large, impression share is a symptom of relevance and no budget will move it.
Almost never. The last portion of an auction is the dearest and the least relevant, so the cost per enquiry rises as you approach full coverage. On a service account that money is usually better spent on more search terms, a wider service area, or a second channel. The exception is a small, tightly defined, high-value keyword set — emergency work in one suburb — where owning the auction outright can be worth the premium.
Open the Campaigns view, click Columns, and add Search impression share, Search lost IS (budget) and Search lost IS (rank) from the Competitive metrics group. Set the date range you want to analyse before you read them, and take all three from the same range and the same campaigns — mixing ranges is the most common reason the three do not add up to 100%.
No, and any tool that claims to is guessing. Impression share tells you what proportion of eligible impressions you received, not how many advertisers took the rest or what any of them paid. The auction insights report will name who else showed on the same searches and how often, which is genuinely useful — but it does not carry a dollar figure and nothing can reconstruct one.
Work on the three things that make up ad rank other than the bid: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. In practice that means tighter match between what people searched and what the ad says, and a page that answers the specific search rather than a homepage. Raising bids does lift rank, but it raises the price of every click you were already winning, so it is the last lever rather than the first.
Run these next
One number rarely settles anything on its own. These three answer the questions this one raises.
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Work out cost per click, conversion rate and cost per lead from three numbers, then compare against a US benchmark and our measured Australian range.
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Split one budget across Google search and Meta, with separate lead-to-job rates per channel, and compare cost per booked job rather than cost per lead.
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We will read
your real ones.
Send us the account rather than the estimate. We will tell you what it is actually costing to win a job, which part of the chain is leaking, and whether it is worth fixing — before anyone asks you to sign anything.