# Impression share, quality score and budget pace > How MeasureScale tells whether a campaign loses impressions to budget or to rank, summarises quality score and projects the month's spend. Two analyses help you decide where a Google Ads budget goes. **Impression share** shows why a campaign misses impressions. **Budget pace** shows whether a campaign will use its monthly budget. Both give you facts to check. Neither says what to change. ## Impression share ### What it answers - Am I losing impressions to budget or to rank? - Which campaigns lose the most clicks? - Is quality score part of the problem? ### What it reads Google reports, for each Search and Shopping campaign, the share of impressions it won and the share it lost to budget and to rank. MeasureScale reads those shares and each campaign's daily budget. It reads quality score for the keywords that had clicks. The diagnosis works per campaign. Google reports a loss to budget for campaigns, not for keywords. ### The diagnosis A campaign needs at least 1,000 impressions in the period. With fewer, the label is "not enough data". You can raise or lower that minimum. | Label | When | |---|---| | Budget limited | At least 10% of impressions were lost to budget, and more than were lost to rank | | Rank limited | At least 10% were lost to rank, and at least as many as were lost to budget | | Both | Both losses are at least 10% and within 5 points of each other | | Healthy | Both losses are below 10% | ### Severity Severity follows the larger of the two losses. | Severity | Larger loss | |---|---| | High | 30% or more | | Medium | 15% to 30% | | Low | Under 15% | ### Extra clicks For the larger cause, MeasureScale estimates the extra clicks the campaign could win. The estimate is an upper bound. It assumes click-through rate, cost per click and conversion rate stay the same as you win more impressions. They rarely do. Treat it as a ceiling. ### Values Google rounds Google reports an impression share under 10% as "less than 10%". It reports a lost share over 90% as "more than 90%". MeasureScale keeps these values and marks the row. It does not rank on them and gives no extra clicks for them. It leaves such a campaign out of the top three and out of the weighted impression share. A share that Google leaves out stays unknown. MeasureScale does not read it as zero. ### Shared budgets A shared budget is lost to every campaign on it, not to one. The answer marks campaigns that share a budget. ### Summary - The number of campaigns under each label. - The impression share across campaigns, weighted by cost, and how much of the spend that covers. - The top three campaigns by the extra-clicks ceiling. ### Quality score Quality score is Google's rating of a keyword from 1 to 10. MeasureScale averages it across keywords, weighted by clicks. It reports: - the average score - the share of clicks on keywords scoring 4 or below - the weakest part of the score: ad relevance, landing page experience or expected click-through rate. It is the part rated below average on the most keywords. - the share of clicks that had a score A keyword with no score is left out and counted. Google gives no score when it has too little data. MeasureScale never reads a missing score as 0. **Quality score is Google's value today.** It is not the value during the period you asked about. The answer always says so. ### Limits - MeasureScale does not say that more budget will win back the lost share. - It does not say that quality score caused a loss to rank. It shows the two facts side by side. - A campaign with fewer than 1,000 impressions gets no diagnosis. ## Budget pace ### What it answers - Will I spend this month's budget? - Which campaigns are ahead of or behind pace? ### How Google spends a daily budget Google can spend up to twice the daily budget on one day. It balances that across the month. Over a month it will not charge more than about a month's worth of the daily budget. MeasureScale calls that the monthly cap. ### What MeasureScale does - It reads each enabled or paused campaign with its budget and its cost so far this month. It also reads removed campaigns, because a campaign removed during the month still spent from a shared budget. - It counts a shared budget once and adds the cost of every campaign on it. - It counts days through yesterday in the account's time zone. - It projects the full month from the spend so far. The projection stops at the monthly cap, because Google stops charging there. - It shows the pace as a percent of the monthly cap. ### Labels | Label | When | |---|---| | On track | The pace is within 15% of the monthly cap | | Under | The pace is more than 15% below the monthly cap | | Over | The pace is more than 15% above the monthly cap. Google will stop serving before the month ends | | Too early | Fewer than 7 days of the month have passed. No projection is shown | | Not supported | The budget does not run per day. The answer shows its cost so far and gives no projection | You can change the 15% band. Ask for a smaller or larger one. A budget whose campaigns are all paused or removed is marked as paused. ### Month - The default month is the current one. - You can ask for an earlier month. A month in the future is refused. - On the first day of a month, the answer shows that day only and no projection. ### Limits - A budget change inside the month is not detected. MeasureScale uses today's budget for the whole month. The answer says so. - Spend is not even across a month. A pace from the first 7 to 10 days can swing a lot. - The projection shows what the current pace implies. It does not say Google will spend the budget. ## Related - [Check how your Google Ads perform](/use-cases/google-ads/) - [Campaign performance and wasted spend](/methodology/ads-performance-and-waste/)