- “Search lost IS (budget)” is the share of searches your campaign was eligible for but missed because its daily budget ran out.
- A campaign with a low cost per job and 20%+ lost to budget is usually the cheapest growth in the account: those are searches you already win, at a price you already like.
- Real account: every campaign lost 34–49% of impressions to budget, including brand searches closing at $20 per job while another campaign spent freely at $483 per job.
- Where to find it: Campaigns → Columns → Competitive metrics → Search lost IS (budget). Also Search impression share and Search lost IS (rank).
- Raising a budget doesn't keep cost per job flat forever. Raise in steps, measure the marginal cost, and stop when it approaches the account average.
Most Google Ads accounts have one campaign that's quietly doing most of the work, and it's usually the one running out of money by mid-afternoon. One column tells you where it is. This guide explains the column, how to read it next to cost per job, and how to move budget without over-correcting.
What the column means
Search impression share is the share of searches where your ad was eligible to appear and did. Search lost IS (budget) is the share you missed because the campaign's daily budget was exhausted. Search lost IS (rank) is the share you missed because your Ad Rank was too low. The three add up to roughly 100%.
A campaign showing 45% lost to budget was invisible for almost half the searches it qualified for. Those weren't new or speculative searches; they were the same searches it already wins the other 55% of the time, at the same cost per click. That's what makes a budget-capped winner different from every other growth idea: the price is already known.
Why capped winners happen
- Budgets are set once. Usually at launch, often equally across campaigns, and rarely revisited when results come in.
- Lead counts hide it. The capped campaign looks fine per lead, like everything else. Nobody is looking at per job, so nobody sees that it's the cheapest.
- Brand campaigns get starved on principle. “They'd find us anyway” is sometimes true and often not; see below.
- The expensive campaign is the exciting one. It targets the big-ticket service, so it gets the budget, even when it closes a fraction of the jobs.
How to find yours
- Open Campaigns, set the date range to the last 60–90 days.
- Columns → Modify columns → Competitive metrics: add Search impression share, Search lost IS (budget) and Search lost IS (rank).
- Add cost and your job conversion action (or conversions, if you measure by lead). Divide to get cost per job per campaign.
- Sort by cost per job ascending. The campaign at the top with a meaningful lost-to-budget figure, say 15% or more, is your capped winner.
| Campaign | Spend | Cost / job | Lost IS (budget) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paint protection · city | $3,858 | $429 | 52% |
| Window tint · suburb | $1,975 | $73 | 55% |
| Brand-name searches | $1,771 | $22 | 36% |
| Paint protection · suburb | $1,769 | $197 | 51% |
| Window tint · city | $1,565 | $125 | 60% |
Every campaign here is capped, which is itself a finding: the account as a whole was under-funded relative to demand. But the two that matter are brand searches ($22 per job, 36% lost to budget) and suburban window tint ($73 per job, 55% lost). The money to fund them was sitting in the city paint protection campaign at $429 per job.
How much to move
- Find the pool. The campaign with the highest cost per job above the account average. Cutting it by half, and narrowing it to the search terms that produced its few jobs, frees a monthly amount. In the example, about $640 a month.
- Size the receiving campaign's headroom. Roughly: current monthly spend × lost IS (budget) ÷ (1 − lost IS). A campaign spending $600 a month and losing 36% to budget could absorb about $340 more before the cap stops binding.
- Estimate pessimistically. Assume the new dollars buy jobs at twice the campaign's current cost per job. If the plan is still better than leaving the money where it was, do it.
- Raise in steps. Two or three increases over three weeks rather than one jump, so you can see where the marginal cost starts climbing.
Watch for diminishing returns
The first dollars you add to a capped campaign buy the same searches at the same price. Past the cap, you're buying lower positions, broader matches or less convenient hours, and cost per job creeps up. That's expected; the question is where it crosses the account average. Checkpoints:
- Week 1: did spend actually move? Lost IS (budget) on the receiving campaign should fall; nothing else should break.
- Week 3: cost per click and cost per lead in the receiving campaign versus its baseline. A 10–20% rise is normal; a doubling means you overshot.
- Day 90: cost per job, with time for jobs to close. Compare the whole account to the baseline you recorded before changing anything.
A note on brand campaigns
Brand searches (people typing your business name) convert cheaply because the decision was made before the search. Some of those people would have found you organically. Two reasons to fund the campaign anyway: competitors can and do bid on your name, and a brand campaign that's 36% capped means a third of the people searching for you saw someone else's ad first. Keep the campaign tight (exact and phrase match on your name only, your own site excluded from non-brand campaigns) and let it run uncapped. It's rarely the biggest line on the receipt, and it's almost always the cheapest.
Questions people ask
Should I just raise every campaign's budget?
No. Raising the budget on a campaign that produces expensive jobs buys more expensive jobs. The point of the column is to find the campaign that produces cheap jobs and is being held back, and to fund it, usually with money from the campaign that produces expensive ones.
Is Search lost IS (rank) the same thing?
No. Lost IS (rank) means your ad wasn't shown because your Ad Rank (bid × quality) was too low, not because you ran out of money. Fixing rank means better ads, landing pages or bids. Fixing budget means money. The two columns sit next to each other and call for different actions.
How quickly will I see results after raising a budget?
Spend and impressions change within a day or two. Leads follow within a week. Paid jobs take longer; they're credited to the click date and close weeks later, so judge cost per job at day 90, not day 10.
My agency says the budget is 'spread evenly' on purpose. Is that wrong?
It's a default, not a strategy. Equal budgets make sense when you don't know which campaign closes best. Once you do know, equal budgets mean deliberately under-funding your best campaign. Ask to see cost per job and lost impression share side by side.