Who Are You Competing Against In Google AdWords?

Have you ever wondered who you are competing against for keyword bids? Wouldn’t it be great to see the specific competition? Now you can see this through the AdWords Auction Insights Report.

Auction Insights allow you to compare your performance against competitors bidding on the same keywords. It is available at the keyword-level and provides insight into impression share, average position, overlap rate, position above rate, and top of page percent.

• Impression share

Impression share is the percentage of impressions you received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.

• Average position

Average position is a look into the ranking of your ads compared to other advertisers competing in the same auction.

• Overlap rate

Overlap rate tells you how often you and the other advertiser received impressions for the keyword at the same time.

• Position above rate

Position above rate shows you how often your competitor’s ad was shown in a higher position when you both received impressions.

• Top of page rate

Top of page rate shows how often your ad was shown the organic search results.

The example below shows who I’m competing with for the keyword Minnesota Resorts:

As you can see Campbell’s Lodge and Explore Minnesota are my top competitors for the keyword Minnesota Resorts with over 90% overlap, position above and top of page rate with an average position below 3.

Auction Insights are only available to be run one keyword at a time and only keywords that have the little gray house icon  to the left of them in the keyword tab have this information available. If your keyword doesn’t have that icon, then I wouldn’t worry about how you are competing because these keywords aren’t reaching the minimum threshold of activity to show this data. As you can see below,  the house icon shows up for (Minnesota resorts) and isn’t showing up for “Resorts in Northern Minnesota”, which is a long-tail keyword that is very focused and does not receive a lot of activity.

Another opportunity with Auction Insights is to use this data to run competitive brand term campaigns. If you can’t compete with them at the keyword level due to budget then it’s worth testing bidding on your competitor’s brand terms. Since running this report I started running ads targeted to people searching for Campbell’s Lodge and Explore Minnesota with attractive offers to book at my client’s resort.

So if you’re scratching your head trying to figure out who’s beating you at the keyword level, give Auction Insights a try!

For more information about how Webtrends Ads can help your brand, contact our team at chase.wells@webtrends.com or visit Webtrends.com.