Hands up if you’d love to know what your competitors are up to for the keywords you target?
Anyone? Everyone? Thought so!
Good news – Google have just added a new report to the AdWords suite which names all of your keyword competitors and gives you the potential to discover their strategy and dominate your high-value keywords.
What is Auction Insights?
This new report gives you 5 key stats:
Impression share. How often your ads show compared to how many times they could show, based on the keywords and your settings.
Average position. Where your ads show on average for all impressions.
Overlap rate. How often your competitor’s ad received an impression when your ad did.
Position above rate. When you and your competitor show at the same time – how often are they higher up the page.
Top of page percent. How often you’re in poll position. You want to know because being there means more people are likely to click on you!
Why will I love Auction Insights?
There’s a myriad of things you can glean from this, but sticking with our 5 theme, here’s 5 top examples:
#1 Paying too much? If you’re number 1 and the competition is lagging, try bringing your bids down to find your sweet spot.
#2 Pay too little? You might be underbidding on particular keywords. We love now having impression share for all keywords, not just the whole ad group. You don’t have to guess which keywords need a boost within your campaign!
#3 What’s going on over there? If a competitor is showing at a higher average position, but only gaining 25% or 50% of the impression share – are they limiting the time their ads are shown or running on a low budget?
#4 Why are you climbing the ranks? You notice a competitor rising up the average position totem pole over time. Check out their ad copy – maybe it’s worth using yourself!
#5 No more guesswork. You can stop using adhoc searches to test competitor activity, which was fraught with danger anyway because of the many variables. You might have searched when they weren’t running an ad, they could be showing ads in different locations to you, different times of the day or just be having budget or AdRank issues.
How can I start using Auction Insights?
If you’re a Google AdWords customer, it’s available for you to check out right now.
You can only run the report for one keyword at a time and it needs to be for keywords, which have reached a minimum threshold, but even with those small limitations Auction Insights is still an absolute game changer.
With it, you can see what competitors are up to, optimise your ads, use your money smarter and you might just make your budget go further.
Who doesn’t want that?!
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