In today’s world of cut-throat competition, marketing is one of the most effective ways to get ahead of your competition. Whilst it’s important to focus on your internal marketing strategy to ensure you reach your business objectives, it’s also worthwhile monitoring your direct competitors activity to ascertain how they interact with potential customers.
If you operate on Google Ads, you can utilise a handy tool called the auction insights report. This provides a means to compare certain aspects of your performance with other advertisers participating in the same auctions as yours.
Such information can help you make strategic decisions about bidding and budgeting by showing you where you’re succeeding and where you may be missing opportunities for improved performance. In doing so, you can benchmark certain elements against your competitors and use this insight to fine-tune your PPC campaigns accordingly.
First of all, how to access this report?
You can access your auction insights report on both Google Search and Google Shopping campaigns. Even though it provides competitor information for similar keyword auctions, it doesn’t mean that these advertisers have the same settings as yours.
Moreover, the report doesn’t reveal sensitive information such as conversions, quality score, bids, or campaign settings, nor does it enable you to see the same information for other people’s campaigns. An auction insights report purely compares your ad’s performance with your direct and indirect competitors who are competing within the same auction.
Your competitors may be using a top Google ads agency for their PPC management so it’s imperative to review the competitive landscape regularly and ensure your campaigns are delivering a good ROI for your business.
The Auction Insights report is available in the form of three levels:
– Campaign
– Adgroup
– Keywords
The Auction Insights report for Search campaigns provide you information about these six metrics:
– Impression share
– Overlap Rate
– Position Above Rate
– Top-of-the-page Rate
– Absolute top of the page rate
– Outranking Share
The Auction Insights report for Shopping campaigns can give you insights on:
– Impression Share
– Overlap Rate
– Outranking Share
How to use this report?
Now that you’re familiar with the metrics included within the auction insights reports, you should also know how to use them to your advantage. First of all, you should know that every term in an auction insights report has its own relevance and hence, you can start by optimising each of them one by one to get better results.
You can begin with impression share and look at other top competitors who are bidding on the same keywords. This metric illustrates your visibility on the search engine by depicting how many impressions you received in a percentile format versus how many impressions you were eligible to receive during the auction. Naturally, you want your impression share to be as high as possible, and you should always compare your standing against the competition to ensure your brand has a strong visibility.
Another useful metric to follow is the ‘position above rate’, which indicates how many times a competitors advert appeared above your brands. This will be influenced by factors such as their cost-per-click and quality score. Many businesses want their ads to appear above their prime competitors but this needs to be closely balanced with the keywords performance as you don’t want to get embroiled in a bidding war for the sake of it.
Bing analytics are also vital
The competitor list you receive from Google Auction Insights will often differ from the companies bidding on similar terms within Bing Ads. It’s common for fewer competitors to operate on Bing due to the low traffic volumes and reach when compared to Google.
However, whilst it’s true that traffic volumes remain low on Bing, the CPC’s are also lower due to reduced competition levels so it’s still worthwhile testing campaigns on the platform. This may give you a slight edge over your main competitors, who have chosen to overlook Bing, and provide your business with a means to generate more conversions and sales.
The above should give you a good insight into what metrics are available within the auction insights report and how the data can be used to your best advantage. With all PPC campaigns, it’s imperative that you monitor the competitor landscape and keep abreast of the latest tools to better manage your campaigns.
