Google Ads Auction Insights Report: Everything You Need to Know

this is Austin from grow my ads and in today's video I'm going to give you a complete breakdown of the Google ads auction Insight report everything you need to know I'm going to go step by

step through each metric what it means and how it impacts your ad account I'm also going to give you a real case study of a client of ours and how when the

competitor spins more and we see that data in the auction Insight report how it's actually impacting our account so I'm going to give you clear as day their auction insight report data and then the

conversion data impact it has on the account so let's go ahead and dive [Music] in all right so how to actually even get to the auction Insight report now I am

in the new interface you may be in the older interface it's going to be the same it just is going to look different but it will be named the same and in the same location as well so I'm looking at

all the campaigns I'm going to go to the left side where their navigation at you go to insights and Report and you hit auction insights now the cool thing about auction insights is you can view

this at sort of the account level you can also go into specific campaigns you can also go into specific ad groups as long as there's enough data so you can

really dive in to these individual campaigns or ad groups especially if looking at all the campaigns doesn't make sense because you may have different competitors in different

campaigns if you're bidding on different products or services within those Campa campaigns in this case for this client actually the campaign level is just fine for us or the account level looking at

the uh the entire thing so I will have unfortunately most of this blocked out it would give away too much information but here's the auction Insight report from this level again this is at the

account level and this is for search campaigns only you could also segment this down by shopping for this client though they're on search only it's an

online training program that they sell now for the time frame that I'm sharing I'm actually going to go to last month which was January of 2024 you will see

this impression share that's the first metric you're going to see next to your display URL domain so the display Ur domain is just your competitor website names and then you will actually just

show as you it it doesn't show your website it just labels you as you but it gives you the websites of the competitors that are showing up in the ad auctions same ad auctions that you're

showing up for now impression share this gets kind of confusing but it's the number of Impressions you receive divided by the estimated number of Impressions you were eligible to receive

so the percent here is just showing the higher percent you have the more you're showing usually this is an indicator that they're spending a lot of money so

if you have a competitor who is spending or has a higher impression share than you so in our our case we're only at a about a 14%

and our top competitor here is at a 35% this is an indicator to us they are spending probably significantly more on ad spin than than we are um now I'm

going to show you a real case study this is the top competitor for us again I can't give you their name but this one this competitor here who is number one

they are our top competitor and the uh ad metrics that you see in this account are highly influenced by what this

competitor doing and so when I read this I see that we are being pretty much outspent by a good portion of the

competitors right now and that's more now a discussion on whether or not we would want to spend more money to compete more with these competitors now in this case we don't we operate off of

specific margin numbers we know what those margin numbers are we're hitting those margin numbers and when competitors ramp up and it impacts our cost we still have to operate within

margin so we know the the current sort of competitive climate right now and this gives us really that data of still what these top competitors are spending if they stopped spending we would

actually then start seeing some of these numbers decrease so with impression share try not to get too in the weeds with it just think of it as hey if if I have a competitor who's has a much

higher impression share than me it probably means they're spending a lot more money than me okay then there's overlap rate so I am going to kind of bring up the definitions for each of these read them and then I'll I'll I'll

give you my thoughts but overlap rate is how often another advertisers ad received an impression in the same auction that your ad also received this is good to know it could mean that some

of them may be bidding on other terms if they have low overlap rates with you so even though they may overlap with you a percentage of the time you may see hey I I wonder why they don't overlap at a

higher rate maybe they're actually bidding on some other terms and then you can do some better competitor analysis there however you can see our top competitor overlaps with us 70% of the

time so when we're in an ad auction they're overlapping with us in that same ad auction almost 70% of the time that is because this is a very Niche industry

it's highly competitive it's very much driven by price and that competitor and us go neck to neck in uh uh competing

and so their price is about what our price is their quality the products very similar to the quality of our product and again it's a training program so the certification you get from that training program is going to be the same

certification that you're basically going to be receiving from them and so this is not news to us but they basically are over 70% of the keywords

that we're in ad auctions for they they're also overlapping with us and and we know that so we we have our bullseye on them then you have position above rate position above rate is how often

another advertiser's ad in the same auction shows in a higher position than your own when both of your ads show at the same time so why is that important

well it's important because this also gives you an indicator of how often they're higher than you in the ad placements now position above rate just means they were above you it doesn't you

could be positioned five and they maybe were positioned four so it doesn't indicate where they were at it just means they were higher than you ad placement wise and so it makes sense

that a lot of our top competitors here who are have higher impression shares and are spending more are actually above us then as well then you have top of

page rate so that does not mean position number one top of page rate just means they were above the organic listings that could be mean Google showed four ads it could mean Google only showed

three it just means they were in those top ad spots during that ad auction in this case 93% of the time our top competitor was in the top ad spots again

this is indicating they're spending a lot and they're also dominating the ad placements because they're higher than us 75% of the time and then 90% of the time they're in the top ad spots then

you have absolute top of page rate that means position number one and this is a really good indicator if someone's really spending a lot of money you'll

see almost 40% of the time our top competitor is in position number one so it's really two competitors here are are trying to dominate that absolute top of

page rate again think of it as position number one and so spending lots of money uh in order for that to happen all right outranking shares so outranking share is if I can get this thing to pull up is

how often your ad ranked higher in the auction than another advertiser's ad okay normally when you see high top of page rate absolute top of page rate position above rate and overlap rates

and impression shares from your competitors your outranking Shar is generally going to be small now if you were dominating your outranking share would would be a higher percent but in this

case because we are getting out spent and out bided essentially our outranking share is very low so these correlate with what you're going to see if these

numbers are high outranking sh share is generally going to be low okay along with all of these metrics you can also as I showed segment by search or

shopping campaigns but you can even go further you can go into time so you can see day of week if there's any fluctuations maybe some competitors go off on the weekends giving you the

opportunity to potentially if you're not showing on the weekends gives you the opportunity to possibly get those cheaper clicks during the weekends I have seen that before a lot of times you're not going to see too too much in

this data but every once in a while you'll find holes that competitors may not be advertising During certain days and you can tackle that so this gives you day of the week you can go day week month quarter or year depending on the

time frames you're looking at you can also segment by device are you actually higher than them on certain devices than others this doesn't I don't look too

deep into this uh our device strategies usually are still just built off of a a a profit goal or or CPA or a row as so as long as we're hitting that those razes or CPAs at that device level

that's really all I care about I don't really care too much how we show on devices but this is interesting you may see certain competitors not be even showing on tablets or mobile and so

maybe that's why your performance on those devices might actually look better and surprise you well it could be because one of the top competitors that you have on desktop

might not even show on mobile so that does happen so it's data to review I do not get to in the weeds with this it could drive you crazy but if you find

some of those outliers like why would mobile be performing when our when you would think your mobile performance isn't great on your uh website it really could come down to one of your competitors just isn't actually

advertising on mobile devices this is where you would find that information now let me show you a real case study in this exact account I'm showing you on

how this top competitor really impacts the performance of our account and that's why we are actually reviewing the auction Insight report data on a monthly

basis because these competitors at times make changes to their ad spend and as soon as we start feeling that in the data we're able to really tackle that at the same time if they increase we know

we're going to our results are going to start dropping so it's something that we're monitoring on a monthly basis it's hard to get like daily so if I go like yesterday it will start showing you some data but you know you can look at this

at least at a weekly time frame sometimes daily is hard to read so I do like looking at at least a good portion of time but you will see some weekly fluctuations as well but usually we're

looking at a lot of the monthly data uh for that so this view is okay right this auction Insight view I'm actually going to go into report editor and inside

report editor PLL uh time series to give you this analysis okay so I am in at the the main level of the account again and

I have pulled from January 2022 all the way to January 31st of 2024 the reason why we've been competing with this competitor of ours for forever so uh I

wanted to share with you this sort of time view of our performance so you'll see conversions really ramped up and

right around April of 2023 we were kind of at Peak and then we started decreasing and then we had this jump up in August of 2023 and now we've been

really down back to almost 2022 levels over the last several months here here okay so you've got like this we grew up we went down we actually had a pop up

and then now we're back to to decreasing here the red line is search top impression share so you'll notice when we were higher in conversions our ads

were being shown in those top spots more often now that we've lost a lot of this top impression share we're actually getting a decrease in conversions that's

100% correlated to what I'm about to show you with the competitor's absolute impression share or top of page rate impression share and overlapping with us

so in this graph I have in the report editor this is the this or or sorry purple line is just that top competitor of ours I'm pulled the same time frame

January 1st of 2022 to 2023 and I have them pulled up okay so you can see position above rate is what I'm looking at how often they overlap

with us in the ad auction so you'll notice January of 2023 they really dropped off and if we go to our

conversions January of 2023 we popped so as soon as they dropped adspin we really had a great month same with February was higher than usual same with

April well come may you see how their position above rate popped up they started spending more again so if we look at May on this graph you notice we

immediately start dropping down and that means okay they're starting to they're they're starting to increase again now check this out August they dropped down again so position above rate went down

to about 60% well look at our results on August we popped up so as they are getting aggressive with spend we start

decreasing and we're not bidding again for any positions this account is solely based on what's our margin and how do we make our make sure that we're hitting

the the the numbers with our ad cost to generate that margin we can't go below a certain margin number so that's what we operate this account off of and the clients will a war aware of obviously this competitor situation we're in so

now you know we build strategies around how do we get around it but at the end of the day we have to operate at a net margin but when this competitor backs off because there are periods of time that they do back off we immediately

start getting more aggressive then and that's why we're watching this auction Insight report we actually have scripts that are pulling this data so we can review auction Insight report numbers

and these time series here graphs so if we start seeing decreases we start looking at the ad data and we might get a little more aggressive during that time period now we will naturally see it

in the ad metric data itself like cpcs uh our search impression share will go up uh usually conversions and conversion rates will start increasing as they drop off in the ad auctions but we like to be

on top of that before then so if we start seeing it in that data and we start seeing it even in search results of our own testing we may get aggressive sooner than waiting for just like a week

or two's worth of data to show that hey actually we have increased now and our conversion ratees gone up so we're all over it and we're using auction Insight data every single day to be reviewing

that this is what I wanted to share with you though I'm using position above rate cuz that gives us the cleanest View of the conversion ups and downs that we

have based off of what they're doing but you could look at other metrics the problem is you know uh it gets a a little not as easy to read so if I look

at you know outranking share you can see similar movements This Is Us outranking them but it doesn't quite tell the the story of that position above rate so if

there's one metric that I look at inside of the auction Insight report a lot of times it is that position above rate because if I have a competitor who has a

high position above rate that means they are very aggressive they're spending a lot and they're always higher than us and I always try to figure out well how is that what are they advertising what's their pricing Etc normally if they're that high up and they're spending that

much money somehow it's working for them but that to me is one of the best indicators to be looking at in regards to competitor data all these other metrics are great especially if you see

a competitor absolute top of page rank really increased that means sometimes they're going for that like ego boost of trying to always be number one I've seen that happen and then after a while you see

them drop off because they no longer uh are profitable at at number one there you go you are now a master of the Google ads auction Insight report I hope you got great value from this video if

you have questions go ahead put them in the comments below I will make sure to try to answer those also if you run a Google ads account whether you're a business business owner a freelancer a work for an agency doesn't matter we

have a free Google ads Community called PPC Launchpad the link to that Community to join is in the description below of this video I would love for you to join there's a free performance Max course in

there you can ask any questions you want about Google ads I'm very active in trying to answer and provide value in that Community along with some of the team members here at Grom my ads so would love for you to join we love for

you to see see you inside and and uh interacting with the group if not no worries I'll see you on the next

[Music] video