Just this last week Google AdWords added an “auction insights” icon to AdWords control panels. On certain keywords (on the keyword tab or keyword rollup found on your campaign tab) you may see a small block graph icon. Tick the box next to the keyword and then click the button called “keyword details” and then select “auction insights”.
AdWords will return a list of your actual competitors and your position in the AdWords auction. The table will show the following data:
- Impression Share
- Average Position
- Overlap Rate
- Position Above Rate
- Top of Page Rate
This information is very important and allows you to be much more strategic about your bidding and to understand more fully what is happening in your account. This additional transparency is welcome indeed and I would like to thank Google for providing it.
Here are a few things you can do with the data:
- If your impression share is high and you are in the top position, you can lower your click cost to have a greater ROI (return on investment).
- You can actually see the names of the businesses and sites you are competing against. You can harvest these names and do an additional ad group to try to take additional market share away from them. This is a short term approach, but as Google will most likely drive the quality score of these keywords down quickly, but you can bleed off a bit of traffic and boost CTR. It just depends on how competitive you want to be.
- If your impression share is low and you are not in the top position as frequently as you would like, this may be a good time to optimize and possibly increase your bid.
- If your impressions share is high, your ROI great, you may want to consider breaking out that keyword and variations of it into its own ad group to get an even higher quality score and even better return.
I have to say that I personally feel that the auction insights tool is a wonderful refinement to AdWords. Knowing who you are competing against and how you really stack up against them by keywords is excellent and a feature I will be using to strategically position my clients in their marketplaces.
For more on how my firm can help you with Google AdWords, please visit our Google AdWords services page for account management options.