You might know about auction insight but does not know how to utilise it to track your performance as compared to your competitor.
We will help you with an overall overview of auction insights, that will also help you to know how you can compare your performance with respect to your competitor’s performance, who are participating in the same auction as you. Taking data from there, you could decide what action you must like to slow down or to act more aggressively.
Auction insights can be accessed at the campaign, ad group or keyword level. The metrics available to measure this comparison are:
Where You can View the Auction Insights Report?
You can view the Auction Insights report for Google Search campaigns and Google Shopping campaigns. Auction Insight will give you information about advertisers who are using the same keywords in auction as you. Keep in mind that it doesn’t mean that other advertisers have the same settings as your’s in their advertising campaigns.
Auction Insight will now show the keywords, quality score, bids, or settings of your campaigns, nor does it show the same information from the campaigns of other advertisers. It is purely based on performance of keywords at the time of auction.
You can access Auction Insights report at three levels:
- Campaign
- Ad Group
- Keywords
In Search campaigns auction insight will provide insights about six metrics:
- Impression share
- Overlap Rate
- Position Above Rate
- Top-of-the-page Rate
- Absolute top of the page rate
- Outranking Share
In Search campaigns auction insight will provide insights about three metrics:
- Impression Share
- Overlap Rate
- Outranking Share
With Auction Insight, you can generate reports for one or more keywords, ad groups, or campaigns, and Auction Insight shows the report only when it meets the minimum threshold of data & activity for the selected date range.
Auction Insights Metrics in Detail
There are six core metrics in the Auction Insights Report. Let me explain all of them:
- Impression Share
Its percentage of impressions your ad receives with respect to the total number of impressions your ad was eligible to receive. You can calculate the impression share as below formula:
For example your Impression Share is 60%, that means your ad displayed 60% of the time that it was eligible to show. You can not directly compare it with your competitors, as their respective impression share depends on their own setting like targeting criteria, statuses, bids, and Quality Scores.
- Overlap Rate
It’s how often your ad received an impression with another advertiser also received an impression. For instance, a 40% overlap rate means that for every 10 impressions you got 4, and an ad from another advertiser also received the impression with you.
If overlap rate is higher, it means that your competitor have similar targeting, budgets, and Ad Rank as you.
- Position Above Rate (In Search Campaigns Only)
Competitor’s ad your ad are shown at the same time, under Position Above Rate it will tells that how often competitor’s ad displayed at higher position than yours in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
For Instance, when you see your Auction Insights report there a competitor has 20% in the Position Above Rate, it means their ad was ranked higher than you in 2 out of 10 times whenever your ads showed at the same time.
- Top of the page Rate (In Search Campaigns Only)
It will answer how often an ad displayed at the top of the SERPs, above the organic search results.
For Instance, if you get 200 impressions, and 60 appear in any of the positions above the organic search results, the top of page rate is 30%.
You can also see your competitors’ report of top of the-page rate in the Auctions Insights 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.
- Absolute Top of the Page Rate (In Search Campaigns Only)
It will answer how often your ad displayed at the very first ad on the page above all other ads.
For Instance, if you have 100 impressions, with 20 being the top spot in SERPs, the absolute top of the page rate is 20%. If you want to increase this absolute top of the page rate, you should influence Ad Rank with its factors focused on increasing your maximum cost per click (max.cpc) bids, and improving your Quality Score.
- Outranking Share
It’s the frequency at which your ads ranked higher than a competitor’s ads in an auction. You can calculate the outranking share as below formula:
Note, 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.
How Auction Insights Will Help You?
So, What will you see the Auction Insights report for your Google Ads Advertising? Here some way to use it:
1. Let you know who is bidding on your brand terms.
With the Auctions Insights report, you can see how your competitors bid for your branded terms.
By using 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.
2. Let you know when competitors are more active.
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.
3. You can see which devices are most competitive
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.
4. You can gauge keyword performance
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.
By using these insights, you can make smarter decisions more efficiently 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.
How the Auction Insights Report will help you to Improve Performance?
The Auction Insights report you will get lots of useful information. Which you can use to improve your campaign.
When you are analysing your campaign performance then you have a lot of questions. That will allow you to analyze your account. We have listed some the important questions that auction insight report help you with answer:
- Who are my competitors in Google ads auctions?
- Are my competitors active throughout the week or month?
- Do any advertisers have a higher impression share for specific campaigns or ad groups?
- What are my most and least competitive campaign and ad groups or keywords?
- How does the competition level influence advertising spend and keyword bids?
- Have any new competitors entered the market recently?
- Is there a correlation between my CPC spikes or conversion declines and the arrival of a new competitor (or an existing competitor increasing their impression share)?
- Who sells similar products to my branded products? Who is using my branded search terms?
After getting the answers of all these above questions, you will have more information that will help you to guide your PPC campaign to success.
Auction Insights Report Limitations:
With respect to so many benefits of auctions insights there are some shortcoming of it also. Some points that we should keep in mind.
- Auctions Insights data has an expiration period of 24 hours.
- Auctions Insights is available for high traffic keywords only.
- It only displays the impression share percentage when the keyword was active..
- It doesn’t show which match types triggered the impressions.
- It doesn’t give information on competitor metrics, such as CPC, clicks, and Quality Score.
- It doesn’t tell you if competitors are actively bidding on a specific keyword.
Wind Up
The Auctions Insights report is an excellent tool to know more about your campaign performance with respect to competition. Auctions Insights data helps you to make decisions to improve your bidding strategies, and optimize your PPC budget.
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