Auction insights report available in Google Ads and Bing Ad Center, lets you track your competition’s behavior (multiple KPIs) over a period of time and across various device types. It gives you the list of all the domains that appeared along your ads for specific keywords you chose.
These reports provide a lot of relevant KPIs that can help you determine if competition is being aggressive or passive in their paid search strategies, if there is any seasonality in their competitive behavior in paid search.
How should you make use of this report?
- Identify your most important paid search campaigns and keywords – These could be the campaigns/keywords that drive maximum revenue, maximum impressions or maximum clicks or a combination of these.
- Download auction insights data for your most important keywords/campaigns segmented by month and device
- Develop a base level understanding of the below KPIs for your most important campaigns/keywords by month
- Overlapping Rate – If you have very high impression share, an increase in overlapping rate is not good. It indicates that someone is trying to increase their impression share.
- Impression share – An increase in competitor’s impression share is not good because it indicates they are being aggressive.
- Position above rate – If competition has higher position above rate, you will need to spend more to rank higher. It will require you to either increase your bids or work on other elements (ad quality, landing page quality etc) to improve your ad rank.
- Develop a base level understanding of the below KPIs for your most important campaigns/keywords by month
The biggest challenge with auction insights analysis is that requires you to download the report manually and analyze it. Unfortunately, this report is still not made available via their Google Sheets add-on or within the Google reports API to enable any automation.
In the absence of it, one of the easiest ways to do health checks on auction insights in Google Ads is to use the Auction Insights card on their overview tab.
It lets you see the time series trend on an account level across various KPIs
You can use multiple filters to get the graphical representation on a campaign and device level. Unfortunately, this report cannot show you the auction insights on a keyword level. Below is an example of looking at auction insights on mobile phones for a specific campaign.
