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How to Use the Auction Insights Report in Google AdWords

Use the auction insights in Google AdWords to compare your competitors‘ and your own campaign, ad group and keyword performance.
In this article we show you where to find the information and how to use it to optimize your campaigns.

You find the auction insights in Google AdWords on campaign, ad group or keyword level under the tab Details. The auction insights report displays an extract of available impressions in the search network for the defined time range.
In our experience the auction insights report never shows 100% of available impressions.
Auction Insights Report

The report contains the following columns:

  1. Impression Share
    The impression share is the number of impressions you received compared to expected impressions. If you received 1000 impressions and 2000 impressions were expected, the impression share is 50%.
  2. Average Position
    This indicator shows you the average position of the ad within the defined time range. This number can differ from the average position in the campaign report, because the auction insights never use 100% of impressions.
  3. Overlap Rate
    This rate shows you how often your competitor‘s ad appeared while your ad was displayed. If your ad had 100 impressions while your competitor‘s ad had 30 Impressions on the same page as your ad, the system will show an overlap rate of 30%.
  4. Position Above Rate
    When your ad is displayed together with the competitor‘s ad, this indicator will show you how many times your competitor‘s ad was displayed in a better position than yours. When your ad is displayed 100 times on the fourth position and the competitor‘s ad is displayed 20 times on a better position, then the position above rate is 20%.
  5. Top of Page Rate
    The top of page rate is the percentage of how many times your ad appeared above the organic search results.

We show you three optimizations you can derive from the information in the auction insights data. We recommend to set the date range to the last 30 days.

  1. Choose the auction insights data for your brand keywords. You can now see the competitors who also bid on your brand keywords. If the competitor receives more impressions or a higher position than you, outrank this competitor by using the target outranking share of the flexible bid strategies.
  2. Choose the auction insights report for one campaign and segment it by the day of the week. You can sort and compare the data better by downloading the report as csv file.
    Auction insights per day of the week
    Now you can see when your competitors had more impressions than you. Adjust the bids in the ad schedule accordingly.
  3. Choose the auction insights report for one ad group. Examine every competitive domain. You may see competitors from other industries. This happens when your keyword options are not exclusively set to “exact match”. Exclude the keywords that better fit your competitors’ services and products. Your campaign for travel insurance for example should not overlap with a life insurance website. In this case exclude words like “life”.

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