This report enables you to compare your performance to that of your auction competitors, offering you the type of campaign performance information that your competitors won’t openly discuss.
Above: A screenshot of the Auction Insights report in Google Ads
The metrics you will see in this report will depend on the type of campaign you are running, but the three that are universally applicable are:
Impression share (IS)
This refers to the number of Impressions you received divided by the estimated amount of impressions you were eligible to receive.
A low impression share could indicate issues with approval statuses and quality scores, but it could also mean that your targeting options have restricted your reach.
Look through your statuses to ensure you’ve not got any unaddressed disapprovals and double-check that you’ve not implemented any unnecessary targeting restrictions.
Overlap rate
This details how frequently your competitors’ ads were shown on the same results page as your own ads.
This is an interesting metric as it allows you to gauge how often your target audience is seeing ads from both you and your competitor during the same search.
Are you often being shown alongside your competitor? If so, what can you do to ensure that your ads stand out the most?
Outranking share
This metric is the percentage of times that your ad ranked higher than other advertisers in the same auction.
If you’re seeing that your competitors are regularly outranking you, look at what you can do to improve your Ad Rank including your bid strategy and ad relevance.
There is also a similar report in Microsoft Advertising, which offers the same metrics and can be found by selecting Competition within the Campaigns box.
Above: A screenshot of the Auction Insights report in Microsoft Advertising
Looking at both reports allows you to see if there are differences in competitors across the two platforms.
For example, while one competitor might outperform you on Google Ads, you might have the upper hand on Microsoft Advertising.
Dig deeper: 3 ways to target your PPC competitors’ audience
Many third-party tools are available that can provide further information about your competitors’ PPC activities, including keyword data and budget estimations.
These can be a great way to add further details to your competitor analysis, particularly when performing keyword gap analysis.
However, remember that unless you’ve got an overly friendly competitor who will give you direct access to analysis of their performance data, you won’t see 100% accurate competitor data via a third-party tool.
Analyzing your competitors’ PPC efforts
Remember that when conducting competitor analysis, you are looking for inspiration and ideas; we are not looking to create a carbon copy of what your competitors are doing.
By analyzing their efforts, we can spot missed opportunities and areas of improvement that we can implement into our own work, allowing us to run better PPC campaigns.
Dig deeper: When to use branded and competitor keywords in PPC
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