What are Auction Insights in Google Ads?
Knowing what your competitors are doing and staying ahead play an important role in your business success. Google provides a couple of metrics that help advertisers to understand where they stand compared to competitions. This data is known as Auction Insights, below we will explain in simple words what each metric means for you.
Impression Share
Impression share is your number of impressions divided by the impressions you are eligible to receive. In simple words, if your ads are allowed to show up on the SERP 100 times, how many times your ads are actually showing. It gives you a good understanding of how likely users can see your ads. Ideally, the higher this number is, the more exposure your ads have.
Overlap Rate
Overlap rate needs to be read with 1 specific competitor. It is how often that specific competitor’s ad shows up when your ad also receives an impression. If the overlap rate is 90%, it means out of 10 times your ads is showing up, this competitor’s ad is also showing. It gives you a good idea who is always showing up alongside your ads.
Position above rate
Position above rate is when both you and your competitors ads are showing how often your competitor’s ad is above yours. 20% position above rate means 2 out of 10 times, when both your and your competitors are showing, your competitor’s ad has a higher position than yours.
You shouldn’t read this metric alone, and should always combine with other metrics. For example, if your overlap rate is only <10%, a 95% position above rate doesn’t mean much. It is because the chance you both show up together is not that much. But if both metrics are quite high, that will be more concerning, because it means when both of you are showing up, most of the time your competitors are above your ads.
Top of page rate
Top of page rate is how often your ads show up on the top part of the SERP, above any organic listing. The recent observation is Google showing at most 4 ads above the organic listing. The top of page rate is how often your ads are appearing in any of those 4 positions. 80% top of page rate means 8 out of 10 times your ads are showing on the top above organic listing.
Absolute top of page rate
Similar to top of page rate, but absolute top of page rate tells you when your ads is showing up at the absolute first position. 50% means 5 out of 10 times your ads are at position 1 when it’s showing up. If you have a high top of page rate (90%) but a very low absolute top of page rate (10%), it means the majority of the time your ads are appearing between 2nd to 4th positions.
Outranking share
The outranking share needs to be checked with a specific competitor. It lets you know how often your ads rank higher than this specific competitor and when you are showing up but they are not. The higher this number is, it means you are more competitive than your competitors.
Don’t look at one metric only
Ideally you need to combine these auction insights to understand your competitiveness. Only looking at one metric can be misleading. If you think it’s bad you have a 60% overlap rate with your competitors, what about if the position above rate is only <10%? It means even though both of your ads are showing up at the same time, most of the time this advertiser has a lower position than your ads.
How Gads.AI help you?
Qualitative insights
With auction insights, you only get quantitative insights but not qualitative ones. You won’t be able to see what your competitors’ ad looks like, what landing pages they are landing users on. Do they like to show up only in specific hours or devices? These are insights Gads.AI can help you with. We save you time and manual efforts by monitoring these for you and sharing the reports with you directly.
Share insights with you on keywords you are not bidding on
You only get auction insights if you are bidding on certain keywords. What about you want to know who is bidding on the SERP regularly without paying for those traffic? Gads.AI helps you gather those insights without having you bidding on any actual keywords.
You can set up monitoring with us for keywords that you like, and we monitor the SERP for you actively and regularly using our technology. We will let you know who is bidding on those keywords, how their ads look like and anyone including the keywords in the ad text. So you can take actions if you need!
We will let you know:
- Which advertisers are bidding on your selected keywords
- How do their ads looks like
- What landing page they land their users to
- How often do your competitors show up for your selected keywords
- What’s their position
Get in touch and start your free trial today!