The Auction Insights sections in Google Ads offers a wealth of information about where competitors are bidding against your business. This is important information as competitive analysis should be a regular task when managing pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Keeping up with what messaging competitors are using, what keywords they’re bidding on and where they’re overlapping with your business are important for keeping ads campaigns ín check.
The Auction Insights report is available for both Search and Shopping campaigns that meet a minimum threshold of activity. To get to Auction Insights from within the Google Ads account, click on “Campaigns” in the left sidebar and select “Auction Insights” from that menu. This will show account-wide insights.
For Search campaigns, a report can be created for keywords, ad groups and campaigns. For Shopping campaigns, a report can be created for ad groups and campaigns. (Those metrics for Shopping only come from the Search Network).
The Auction Insights filter allows to see at a glance which of the keywords, ad groups or campaigns have Auction insights reports available to view.
The reports can be made practical to the account management process by identifying new competition to then stimulate the launch of further competitor analysis of what they are doing online and how much of a threat they may be.
Also, an established competitor who’s starting to scale up advertising efforts can be determined by an increased overlap rate with your ads, when they haven’t had that in the past. By doing that reporting, more of your business’s advertising revenue can then be specifically allocated to tackle that increased threat.
Looking at Auction Insights by month can identify seasonality trends and it can be determined if other businesses increase their activity in search at the same time as your business.
By accessing Auction Insights for your brand campaign, you can see a snapshot of the other companies who are bidding most aggressively on your brand name and which ones are likely allocating the most budget and the highest bids toward competitor bidding, based on higher impression share in the report.
Monitoring Auction Insights reports is an important management task that identifies core competitors and tracks their bidding activities month by month, allowing your business to respond accordingly, often at critical times, to compensate for much increased competition.
If you want more information about how these Google Ads reports can benefit the online competitiveness of your business, please get in touch.