How To Keep A Close Eye On Your Competitors With Auction Insights

Published by Algorithmic Global on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020

What is the auction insights?  

The Auction insights report lets advertisers compare the performance of your AdWords account with other competitors who are bidding on the same keywords as you within your target areas. 

We can all agree that its an advantage to know what the competition is doing. This information can advertisers make strategic decisions in terms of bidding and budgeting by showing you where you’re doing well and where you may be missing opportunities for better performance. Although you are in control of your bids and budget, it’s your competitors who determine what you need to pay to obtain the top position of your ads.

There are third-party tools that provide some competitor information. Still, their data on average position, impression share, outranking share, etc., will never be as accurate compared to the actual AdWords data that you can get from the Auction Insights report. 

Understanding Your Auction Insights Report

Upon seeing your auction insights, you are greeted by a few metrics, which can be a little confusing at first, so to make things less complicated, below is a list of metrics and what each one means.

1. Impression Share: The number of impressions you received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive
2. Position Above Rate: How often another advertiser’s ad in the same auction showed in a higher position than your own when both of your ads were shown at the same time.
3. Overlap Rate: How often another advertiser’s ad received an impression in the same auction that your ad also received an impression.
4. Top of Page Rate:  How often your ad (or the ad of another participant, depending on which row you’re viewing) was shown at the top of the page, above the unpaid search results.
5. Abs. Top of Page Rate: How often your ad (or the ad of another participant, depending on which row you’re viewing) was shown at the absolute top of the page as the very first ad above the organic search results.
6. Outranking Share: How often your ad ranked higher in the auction than another advertiser’s ad, or if your ad showed when theirs did not.
7. Display URL Domain: This is the URL your competitor is using in their ads. Use this to identify who your competition is. 

How To View Your Auction Insights

Navigate to the Campaigns, Ad Groups, or Keywords that you want to review.

1. Navigate to a specific account
2. Select the particular campaign, ad group, or keyword 
3. Click on Auction Insights.

The data produced by the auction insights can help advertising specialists answer a number of questions, like:

•  Is there a competitor affecting my account performance?
• Why did our CPC increase? Is it due to our competitors bidding on the same keywords as us?
• Are there competitors that are bidding on the brand terms that we aren’t bidding on?

The auction insights is a helpful feature within AdWords, that can help you understand the performance of your campaigns compared to your competition, and it’s straightforward to know for a better advertising strategy. We hope this was helpful, leave a comment below and don’t forget to subscribe to our blogs!