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It’s human nature to want to know what everyone else around you is doing. In marketing, it makes sense to check out the competition, and so, with the Google Ads Auction Insights report, you have the perfect tool.
Read on to find out what the Auction Insights report can offer pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers and how you can use it to your advantage.
The Auction Insights report is a tool from Google Ads, which provides data insights about paid advertising performance, allowing advertisers to compare their keyword bid performance against competitors in the same auctions.
With these insights from Google Ads auction insight report, you can identify flaws in your strategy and new opportunities, and ultimately, make smarter strategic decisions to enhance your PPC campaign performance and return on investment (ROI).
You can access the Auction Insights report on both Google Search and Google Shopping campaigns. Keep in mind that while it provides information on advertisers in the same keyword auctions, it doesn’t infer that these advertisers have the same settings as you in their advertising campaigns.
As such, the report doesn’t reveal your keywords, quality, bids, or settings, nor does it allow you to see the same information in the campaigns of others. It is purely based on performance.
The Auction Insights report is available at three levels
The Auction Insights report for Search campaigns provide insights about six metrics:
The Auction Insights report for Shopping campaigns provides insights for:
You can generate a report for one or more keywords, ad groups, or campaigns, providing they meet a minimum threshold of activity for the time period selected. Also, you must segment results by time and device.
There are several core metrics in the Auction Insights Report. Let’s explore each of them:
Impression Share is the percentage of impressions your ad receives relative to the total amount of impressions it was eligible to receive. You can calculate the impression share as follows:
So, if your Impression Share is 40%, that means your ad displayed 40% of the time that it could have shown. It’s difficult to compare this with your competitors, as their impression share depends on factors like targeting criteria, statuses, bids, and Quality Scores.
Overlap rate is how often your ad received an impression when another advertiser in the auction also received an impression. For instance, a 20% overlap rate means that for 2 of every 10 impressions you got, an ad from another advertiser also displayed.
A higher overlap rate suggests that you and the competitor have similar targeting, budgets, and Ad Rank.
When your ad and a competitor’s ad shows at the same time, the Position Above Rate tells us how often the competitor’s ad displayed in a higher position than yours in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
For example, if you see in the Auction Insights report that a competitor has 10% in the Position Above Rate column, it means their ad was ranked higher than yours 1 in 10 times whenever your ads showed at the same time.
Top-of-the-page Rate is how often an ad displayed at the top of the SERPs, above the organic search results.
For example, if you get 100 impressions, and 20 appear in any of the positions above the organic search results, the top-of-page rate is 20%.
You can view your competitors’ top-of-the-page rate in the Auctions Insights report too. Remember that this metric is independent of your ad impressions. So, if you and a competitor have a top-of-the-page rate of 90%, it’s quite likely that you don’t get impressions at the same time. You can compare this rate with the overlap rate for deeper insights.
The absolute top-of-the-page rate is how often an ad displayed as the very first ad on the page, above the organic search results and above all other ads.
For example, if you have 100 impressions, with 10 earning you the top spot in SERPs, the absolute top-of-the-page rate is 10%. If you want to increase this rate, you should focus on increasing your maximum cost-per-click (max.cpc) bids, and improving your Quality Score, as these factors influence Ad Rank.
Outranking share is the frequency at which your ads ranked higher than a competitor’s in an auction. You can calculate the outranking share as follows:
Note that, when you make this calculation, you should include instances where your ad appeared in auctions when your competitor’s ad did not.
The outranking share metric offers the best insight into how you are faring head-to-head with another competitor.
So, what can you use the Auction Insights report for in PPC advertising? Here are four good reasons to use it:
Ranking for your brand terms is the bare minimum aim when you focus on improving search engine optimization for your business. With the Auctions Insights report, you can see how your competitors bid for your branded terms.
With this information, you can devise a bidding strategy that will ensure you block competing bids, and attract most of the click traffic for your chosen brand terms.
Knowing when your competitors are placing bids is useful as you can identify days of the week or specific times of the day when they are more active (or less active). You can then adjust your bidding schedule accordingly to win more auctions when it matters.
Perhaps your competitors target specific keywords on mobile, but other keywords on desktop. Use these insights to tweak your bidding strategy, so that you can outbid competitors for your target keywords on various devices, effectively maximizing your reach and ROI on each device.
The Auction Insights report offers performance data for individual keywords or sets of keywords. You can use this information to assess the performance of your keywords — or your competitor’s keywords.
Given these insights, you can make smarter decisions about reducing bids, and subsequently, reducing your cost-per-acquisition (CPA).
You can also identify patterns in other key metrics, including quality score, which will guide decision-making to optimize your PPC budget in other ways.
Now that you know why you should use it let’s show you how to run the Auction Insights report in Google Ads.
With a Google Search campaign, you can create a report for your keywords, ad groups, and campaigns. For a Google Shopping campaign, you can create a report for ad groups and campaigns.
Here’s what to do:
1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. Select your preferred menu depending on what insights you wish to see – Campaigns, Ad Groups, or Keywords
3. Select a specific campaign, ad group, or keyword by checking the relevant box.
Note: If you’re running a keyword report, you can only select keywords on a single page at a time (unless you run a report for “All”).
4. Select the Auction Insights tab.
Now, you’ll be taken to your Auction Insights report.
Note that only ad groups and keywords that meet a minimum activity threshold will be shown in the Auction Insights report. If you selected only Search or only Shopping campaigns or ad groups, you’d see the corresponding Auction Insights report.
However, if you selected a mix of Search and Shopping campaigns or ad groups, then you will need to select the Search campaigns or shopping campaigns radio button to navigate between them.
What if you want to locate specific campaigns, ad groups, and keywords to drill-down for detailed insights?
For that, you can create a filter in the Auction Insights report, which allows you to quickly see which of your keywords, ad groups, or campaigns have Auction Insights reports available.
Follow these steps to use the Auction Insights filter:
1. Select the Filter icon above your statistics table.
2. Choose one of the filters from the drop-down menu.
3. A list of conditions will appear. Enter the condition you wish to view, then click Apply. The table will automatically update to display your campaigns, ad groups, or keywords with available Auction Insights reports.
The Auction Insights report offers advertisers a lot of useful information, which you can use to great effect.
When you put your campaign performance under the microscope, you’re sure to have a lot of questions. Here are eight vital questions that this auction insights in google ads can help you answer:
When you get answers to these questions, you will have the knowledge you need to guide your PPC campaigns to success. Ultimately, this comes down to three valuable benefits:
The Auction Insight report lets you see which keywords your competitors focus on most. You can identify trending search terms, and start bidding on them to earn a higher impression share.
While you can’t see what your competitors spend, you can see which keywords earn them impressions and top spots. Therefore, you can deduce that they are spending more than other advertisers on these terms.
If you see a website that has a very high impression share and top-of-the-page rate on a competitive keyword for several weeks or months, they are quite probably getting a lot of good results from that keyword.
Analyze their content for the pages the keyword is on, as you can get ideas of what to optimize on your pages to drive a higher conversion rate.
While there are plenty of benefits of the Auctions Insights report, it is not without its shortcomings. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
The Auctions Insights report is an excellent tool to learn more about your keyword performance. Moreover, the information helps guide your decision-making, improve your bidding strategies, and optimize your PPC budget.
If you want to know more, read our blog about Google Ads Bidding Strategies for Success.
How will you use the Auction Insights report in 2020?
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