A significant update from Google has left digital marketers rethinking their approach to Auction Insights reporting. Starting August 24, 2024, Auction Insights data will no longer be available for new data sources in Looker Studio, and by September 23, 2024, existing reports will lose access entirely. For PPC professionals who rely on Auction Insights to analyze competitive performance, this is a major shift.
The impact is compounded by the fact that Google Ads API doesn’t currently provide access to Auction Insights data. This limits the available solutions for visualizing and analyzing your competitive metrics efficiently.
However, there are still practical ways to visualize Auction Insights data without relying on Looker Studio or manual analysis. In this article, we’ll explain the impact of these changes, explore why Auction Insights remains vital for your PPC strategy, and share an effective approach to analyze this data moving forward easily.
Why Auction Insights matter for PPC campaigns
Auction Insights provide a competitive snapshot of your performance in Google Ads auctions. These metrics are critical for:
- Understanding Market Share: Impression Share shows how much visibility your ads have compared to competitors.
- Benchmarking Performance: Metrics like Position Above Rate and Outranking Share reveal how often your competitors outperform you.
- Identifying Optimization Opportunities: By analyzing trends in Overlap Rate and Top of Page Rate, you can pinpoint areas for improvement and allocate budget more effectively.
- Strategic Decision-Making: Auction Insights data informs bidding strategies, helps refine ad copy, and highlights opportunities to capture additional market share.
Without an easy way to visualize this data, PPC managers risk missing these valuable insights.
How to use Auction Insights in Google Ads
With Auction Insights, you can compare your ad performance with other advertisers in the same auctions. This comparison provides critical insights into your competitive market, so you can make informed decisions to boost your PPC campaigns.
You can access Auction Insights at the campaign, ad group, or keyword level:
- Campaign or Ad Group Level:
- Navigate to the “Campaigns” or “Ad groups” tab in your Google Ads account.
- Select the specific campaign or ad group you’re interested in.
- Click on “Auction insights” from the options above the statistics table.
- Keyword Level:
- Go to the “Keywords” tab and select “Search keywords.”
- Choose the keyword(s) you wish to analyze.
- Click on “Auction insights” from the options above the table.
What do key metrics mean?
The Auction Insights report provides several metrics that shed light on your ad’s performance relative to competitors:
- Impression Share: Percentage of impressions your ads received out of total eligible impressions. Low shares may signal a need to adjust bids or ad quality.
- Overlap Rate: Frequency of competitors’ ads appearing alongside yours. High rates suggest direct competition for the same audience.
- Position Above Rate: How often competitors’ ads ranked higher than yours. Frequent occurrences may require improving relevance or increasing bids.
- Top of Page Rate: Frequency of ads appearing at the top of the page above organic results. Low rates may need better ad quality or bid adjustments.
- Absolute Top of Page Rate: Frequency of ads appearing as the very first ad above organic results. Higher rates boost visibility and click-through rates.
- Outranking Share: Frequency of your ad ranking higher or appearing when competitors’ ads did not. Higher shares signal a competitive edge.
By analyzing these metrics, you can:
- Identify competitors: Determine which advertisers are competing for the same audience and keywords.
- Adjust bidding strategies: If your ads are frequently outranked, consider increasing bids or improving Quality Scores to enhance ad positions.
- Enhance ad quality: Improve ad relevance and landing page experience to boost Quality Scores, thereby increasing the likelihood of securing top ad positions.
- Refine targeting: Analyze overlap and outranking metrics to adjust keyword targeting, ensuring your ads reach the most relevant audience.
- Optimize ad scheduling and devices: Segment Auction Insights data by time and device to identify when and where competitors are most active, allowing you to strategically schedule ads and allocate budgets.
Challenges with Google Ads API: limited Auction Insights access
To make matters more challenging, Auction Insights data is not accessible via the Google Ads API. This means:
- While Google Ads API doesn’t provide direct access to Auction Insights, you can still automate data extraction and visualization using effective workarounds. Learn how to achieve this with our step-by-step guide here: How to Pull Google Auction Insight Data in an Automated Way.
- Manual analysis becomes time-consuming and prone to errors.
- Visualizing Auction Insights data in a meaningful way requires a workaround.
This gap leaves marketers in search of alternative solutions to analyze and communicate competitive performance data effectively.
How the Auction Insights Tool solves these challenges
We developed the Auction Insights Tool to address a key challenge PPC managers face—the lack of accessible and visualized Auction Insights data. With Google removing Auction Insights from Looker Studio and no direct API access, PPC managers needed an efficient way to analyze their competitive metrics without spending hours on manual reporting.
Why PPC managers need this tool
- Simplify Competitive Analysis: We created this tool to save time and simplify how you interpret critical metrics like Impression Share and Position Above Rate, which are essential for understanding how you perform against competitors.
- Adapt to Google’s Changes: As Looker Studio support ends for Auction Insights, our tool ensures you can still extract value from your Google Ads data without disruption.
- Visualize Trends Effortlessly: Instead of sifting through CSV files, this tool generates clean, interactive charts to help identify trends, opportunities, and areas where competitors gain ground.
The process is simple: export your Auction Insights report as a CSV file, upload it to the tool, and instantly visualize your competitive data. By focusing on actionable insights, PPC managers can continue to make data-driven decisions without relying on Looker Studio or scripts.
