Google Adwords introduces new Auction Insights report

Google has recently introduced a new analysis tool in Adwords that helps advertisers understand market activity and plan better bid strategies. Called the “Auction Insights Tool”, it can be accessed at keyword level and shows competitor information and potential missed opportunities for search rankings. By revealing more information from the underlying AdWords system, Google is now giving advertising a real insight into the complex ad auction system.

This new Auction Insights tool can be found under a new ‘Keyword Details’ button in the Adwords interface when looking at Keywords reports. However, not all keywords are eligible and require a minimum volume of impressions, so you can only access this report if search terms are attracting at least 200 impressions or more for the selected time period. In addition, the report can only be viewed at an individual keyword level, so each term may need to be analysed separately.

So what sort of data does the Insights tool provide? Previously, Google just provides impression share data at campaign and adgroup level, which tell the advertiser how many times the ads were displayed out of the total possible times that the ads could have been shown for relevant searches. Now, however, the new Insights report gives valuable information on competitor activity and missed opportunities at the keyword level so that deeper analysis can be made an advertiser’s performance, including:

• Impression share – percentage of impressions that each advertiser achieved for the search term, out of the total possible
• Average position – achieved by each advertiser for the term over the time period
• Overlap rate – how often another advertiser’s ads appeared when your own ad was shown
• Position above rate – how often another advertisers ads appeared above yours when both appeared for the search
• Top of page percent – how often each advertisers ad appeared in the top positions above the main search results.

Therefore you can now assess which keywords some of your major competitors are putting a heavy focus on. When you see that a competitor has a “high impression share” or “top of Page Rate”, it raises questions about their possible strategy for those terms and whether it should be countered. It might indicate a good converting term or perhaps a higher bid rate or better Quality Score than your campaign is achieving. The tool won’t tell you how much your competitors are spending but it does tell you how often they appear on Google for specific keywords.

If you find a particular competitor is gaining close to 100% impression share for a lot of keywords and also appearing at the top of the page most of the time, then this might suggest they have a large budget allocated to AdWords or a bigger budget than any of their other competitors. This could also present an opportunity to increase your own spend to compete for that space, although of course there will be other factors involved in determining the eventual ROI and you still need to manage your advertising to meet your own targets.

For more information about the new Auction Insights tool, please contact us now.

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