With the inherent competition of Google Ads, any insight and advantage you can get is a plus. One of the key tools to combat that is Google’s Auction Insights, which provides helpful data about your ads and their performance, just like other metrics — but relative to your competitors.
Let’s get into it:
An intro to Auction Insights
Auction Insights is Google Ads’ tool where you can compare your performance with other advertisers competing in the same auctions.
This gives you greater transparency on how you’re faring in relation to competitors — and vice versa — beyond just the standard performance metrics like clickthrough rate, cost-per-click, and so on. From there, you get more insights to inform your strategic decisions and subsequent optimization efforts.
How to access Auction Insights
To access, first navigate to your Google Ads dashboard.
From there, click on campaigns, ad groups or keywords, and select Auction Insights from the dropdown menu. It’s important to note that Auction Insights can be viewed at different levels, whether campaign, ad group, or keyword.
Key Auction Insights metrics
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You’ll find six key metrics provided by Auction Insights:
- Impression share
- Overlap rate
- Position above rate
- Top of page rate
- Outranking share
- Absolute top of page rate
What do these mean?
Impression share: This is the percentage of total impressions your ads received over the total number they were eligible for.
Overlap rate: How often your ad and a competitor’s ad were displayed in the same auction.
Position above rate: How often a competitor’s ad ranked higher than yours in the same auction. (I.e. how often a competitor’s ad was positioned above yours.)
Top of page rate: How often your ad (or a competitor’s ad) appeared at the top of the page.
Outranking share: How often your ad ranked higher than your competitor’s ad.
Absolute top of page rank: How often your ad appeared in the absolute first position on the page — i.e. the top ad of the top-of-the-page ads.
How to interpret your Auction Insights, and using them to improve your campaigns
While Auction Insights won’t show you exact competitor bidding budgets or strategies, it does give you a sense of how well your campaigns are performing relative to them.
At the same time, it doesn’t necessarily indicate your overall success.
What it does do, is give you information that can be the foundation for improving your campaign’s effectiveness and efficiency. Auction Insights will give you hints on:
- Identifying competitors
- Adjusting bids
- Improving ad quality
- Optimizing budgets
- Refining targeting
The first step to making these improvements is — like with more conventional metrics — to establish which ones are most relevant to your specific goals.
For example, focus on metrics like impression share and top of page rate to determine if you’re being outranked — a lower impression share means your competitors are boxing you out, while your account having a high top of page rate means you have the edge over them.
In an ideal world, your absolute top of page rank, top of page rank, outranking share, and impression share will be as high as possible, with a low position above rate. At the same time, the specifics of what’s “good” versus “bad” depends on the context — what are your goals? Your budget? How does this snapshot fit into your greater strategy? And what are your priorities within the pursuit of those goals?
Best practices and common mistakes to avoid
AKA, do’s and don’ts.
Do: Regularly monitor your Auction Insights to keep updated on your competitive landscape. (You may have heard us say the same about, well, most things.)
Don’t: Focus solely on outranking competitors — hyper-fixating on position alone can distract you from other details that are contextually more efficient (and more important), plus overall campaign goals. Rank matters, but your return on investment will likely be minimal or even net negative if that’s your sole focus.
Do: Use the incoming data alongside other, non-Auction Insights performance metrics — for example click-through-rate, conversion rates — for a more comprehensive, holistic view of your campaign.
Don’t: Ignore impression share. This metric can tip you off that you’re missing out on valuable impressions.
Don’t: Overreact to short-term fluctuations. Day-to-day changes are to be expected, but focus on overall, bigger picture trends — otherwise you become susceptible to overcorrecting based on minimal sample size and missing the forest through the trees.
Bottom line
At the end of the day, Auction Insights are just a really helpful tool to give you additional insight alongside your standard ones; essentially, they’re helping contextualize the information you’re getting so that you better understand not just how you’re performing, but the competitive environment in which that performance is happening.
These strategic insights give you a superior foundation to optimize your advertising, better.
