What is auction insights?
Auction insights show how your paid ads perform against competitors in Google Ads. It helps you understand your market position and identify improvement areas.
Key points
- Compares your ad performance to competitors in Google Ads.
- Helps identify new market rivals and their ad presence.
- Provides data on impression share, overlap rate, and outranking share.
- Crucial for optimizing bids and refining paid ad strategies.
Why auction insights matter
Auction insights are crucial for any marketing team running paid ad campaigns because they provide transparency into the competitive environment. Without this data, you're essentially flying blind, unaware of how other players are influencing the ad auction. Here's why it's so important:- Competitive analysis: It clearly identifies direct competitors for your chosen keywords that you might not have known about. This allows you to research their strategies and offerings.
- Performance benchmarking: You can compare your impression share, average position, and other metrics against competitors to see if you're gaining or losing ground.
- Opportunity identification: If a competitor has a high impression share where you have low performance, it signals an opportunity to adjust your bids or improve your ad relevance.
- Budget allocation: Understanding where you're being outranked helps you decide where to invest more or less of your ad budget for maximum impact.
How to use auction insights effectively
Using auction insights isn't just about reading the report; it's about translating that data into actionable strategies. Here are some ways to put it to work:Identifying competitive gaps
Look for competitors with high impression share, especially if your own is low. This suggests they are bidding aggressively or have highly relevant ads. Analyze their presence and consider if you need to adjust your bids or improve your ad copy to compete more effectively. You might also discover new competitors that you weren't aware of, giving you a chance to react quickly.Optimizing bid strategies
If yourReal-world examples
Beating a new competitor
A small e-commerce store selling handmade jewelry notices a new, aggressive competitor in their auction insights report. By analyzing the competitor's high impression share and overlap rate, the store adjusts its bidding strategy on specific keywords and improves its ad copy to highlight unique selling points, regaining market visibility.
Improving impression share
A digital marketing agency manages ads for a local plumbing service. Their auction insights report shows a low impression share compared to competitors, especially during peak hours. They use this data to increase bids during these crucial times and refine geo-targeting, leading to more calls and service requests.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Only looking at overall impression share without digging into specific campaigns or keywords where competition might differ.
- Ignoring new competitors that appear in the reports, assuming they are not a threat to your market share.
- Making drastic changes to bids or budgets based on a single week's data without observing longer-term trends or seasonal impacts.