Understanding Google’s Auction Insights

Google Ads offers a wealth of insights into your ad campaigns, helping you optimise performance. One of the most valuable tools is Auction Insights, which provides detailed information about your ad’s performance relative to competitors. In this blog, we’ll explore the key components of Auction Insights and how to interpret them effectively.

Why is looking at your competitor’s visibility important?

Understanding your competitors and their ranking positions is crucial for several reasons. It allows you to benchmark your performance against industry leaders, identify opportunities for improvement, and gain insights into effective marketing strategies. By knowing where your competitors stand, you can tailor your own approach to stand out in the market.

How can your competitors impact your campaign’s performance:

When a competitor increases their impression share, it can significantly impact your campaign’s performance and costs. Here’s how:

· Increased Competition: As the competitor captures more impressions, competition for ad placements intensifies. This can lead to higher CPCs as advertisers bid against each other to secure prime positions.

· Decreased Impression Share: If your ad quality and bidding remain constant, you may experience a decline in your own impression share. This means your ad is less likely to be shown to potential customers.

· Reduced Click-Through Rate (CTR): With more ads on the page, users may be less likely to click on your ad. A lower CTR can negatively impact your ad’s relevance and quality score.

· Decreased Conversion Rate: A lower CTR can result in fewer clicks, potentially impacting your conversion rate. This means fewer users are reaching your website and taking desired actions.

· Increased Costs: Higher CPCs and potentially lower conversion rates can lead to increased costs per acquisition (CPA). This means you’ll be spending more to acquire each customer.

Key Auction Insights Metrics

· Impression Share: The percentage of impressions you’ve received compared to the total number of impressions you were eligible for.

· Outranking Share: The percentage of times your ad ranked above a competitor’s ad.

· Top of Page: The percentage of times your ad appeared at the top of the search results page.

· Top of Page (Absolute): The percentage of times your ad appeared at the absolute top of the page, excluding ads that might be displayed above search results.

Interpreting Auction Insights

· High Impression Share but Low Outranking Share: This suggests that your ad is eligible for many impressions but is often outbid by competitors. Consider increasing your bids or improving your ad’s quality to rank higher.

· High Outranking Share but Low Top of Page: Your ad is frequently outranking competitors, but it’s not appearing at the top of the page. This could be due to factors like ad extensions or landing page quality.

· Low Position: If your ad is consistently appearing in lower positions, it’s likely due to a combination of low ad rank and high competition. Focus on improving your ad’s quality, landing page experience, or increasing your bids.

· Low Ad Strength: A low ad strength rating indicates that your ad could be improved. Consider refining your ad copy, using more relevant keywords, or enhancing your landing page.

Utilising Auction Insights for Optimisation

· Identify Opportunities: Use Auction Insights to pinpoint areas where you can improve your campaign performance.

· Set Goals: Establish clear goals based on your Auction Insights data, such as increasing your impression share or top of page rate.

· Make Data-Driven Decisions: Use the insights to inform your bidding strategy, keyword targeting, and ad optimisation efforts.

· Monitor and Adjust: Regularly review your Auction Insights data and make adjustments to your campaign as needed.

By understanding and effectively utilising Auction Insights, you can gain valuable insights into your Google Ads performance and make data-driven decisions to improve your results.

How To Improve Your Impression Share, By Optimisation:

Optimising your campaigns can significantly improve your impression share. By refining your targeting, improving ad quality, and adjusting bids strategically, you can increase the likelihood of your ads appearing in relevant search results. This not only boosts visibility but also enhances the chances of reaching your target audience, leading to more clicks and conversions. Additionally, optimising your campaigns can help you allocate your budget more effectively, ensuring that your ads are shown to the most qualified potential customers.

Let’s look at some ways you can improve your impression share..

1. Budget and Bids:

· Increase Your Budget: Allocate more funds to your campaigns to ensure your ads can compete in more auctions. In some cases, more budget is not an option and it is something to consider in the competitor landscape, as you may be competing with some strong competitors with 5x your budget – look at some longer tailed and more specific keywords to ensure you are bidding on search terms that are further down the funnel, those are typically cheaper with a stronger conversion rate.

· Raise Your Bids: By bidding higher, your ads are more likely to appear in top positions, leading to increased visibility. Consider your daily budget here, as if you have a budget of £10, and your average CPC of your keywords are £3, you can get around 3 clicks a day!

· Utilise Bid Strategies: Consider using automated bidding strategies like Target CPA or Target ROAS to optimise bids based on your campaign goals, based on real-time factors like time of day, device, and competition, ensuring your ads remain competitive in different scenarios.

2. Keyword Optimisation:

· Expand Keyword List: Look at your current keyword set and review the efficiency, in both lead volume, search volume and CPC. Also take a look at your search terms, are your audience using alternative phrases to find what you are providing, these may have a cheaper CPC and may be more effective.

· Negative Keywords: Exclude irrelevant keywords to prevent your ads from showing to unqualified users. Ensure that the terms your ads are triggering are relevant, to ensure you are being efficient with the budget you have.

3. Ad Quality:

· Enhance Ad Relevance: Ensure your ad copy is highly relevant to your target keywords and landing page. Conduct an A/B test with a range of ad copies (price vs without, sales messaging vs USP) to see what your audience responds to. Ensure to include your keywords in the ad copy or headlines at least 2-3 times to improve the ad relevance.

· Improve Landing Page Experience: Create a user-friendly landing page that aligns with the ad’s message and encourages conversions. Use tools such as Hot Jar to look at the user experience and if there is something effecting their journey to conversion

· Monitor Click-Through Rate (CTR): A high CTR indicates relevant ads, which can positively impact your ad rank and impression share.

4. Targeting:

· Refine Targeting: Use demographic, geographic, and interest-based targeting to reach your ideal audience. Review the audiences you have in the account and their average CPA/ROAS – it could be that one audience out-performers another and you can add a modifier on there, to tell Google you are happy to pay 20% more for a click for someone who fits into a specific audience type. You can do this for devices, location and time/hour of day to enhance your overall results based on the data you have collected thus far.

5. Ad Extensions:

· Utilise Ad Extensions: Add extensions like sitelinks, callouts, and snippets to make your ads more informative and engaging. Ad extensions help your ad take up more real estate in the SERP, pushing other competitors further down – enhancing your CTR and overall conversion rate. Ensure these are relevant to the ad and campaign.

· Optimise Extensions: Regularly review and update your extensions to ensure they are relevant and appealing. Take a look at the competitors in your bidding space, what

pages do they have on their site that we don’t this can highlight gaps on your site that you can create a page and content for – improving the users experience as a whole.

Google’s Auction Insights tab is a valuable tool for understanding your ad performance and gaining insights into your competitors’ strategies. By keeping an eye on what other advertisers are doing, you can identify opportunities to improve your own campaigns, stay competitive, and ultimately achieve better results. Whether you’re looking to increase your impression share, outrank competitors, or improve your overall ad quality, Auction Insights provides the data and insights you need to make informed decisions and optimise your Google Ads performance.

If you would like more information on how to optimise your campaigns and help your business compete in the digital space, contact our team of experts!