Tracking Your AdWord Competitors Using Auction Insights

Google Ads is an online advertising platform developed by Google, the software development giant, where advertisers bid to display brief ads, service offerings, product listings, or videos to the web users. It can place ads both in the results of search engines like Google Search and on non-search websites, mobile apps, and videos. Google Ads offers several bid strategies that are tailored to suit different types of campaigns. Depending on which networks your campaign is targeting, and what the ultimate goal of your campaign is, you can pick out the most appropriate strategy for it. Now, this bid requires you to place money on the keywords and search phrases of your choice. The Auction insights report lets you compare your performance with other advertisers who are participating in the same auctions that you are i.e. who have placed bids on the same keywords or phrases that you have. A good PPC campaign requires meticulous planning and care that it is in sync with the overall digital marketing strategy. So if you are fairly new to the field, there are multiple PPC companies in Delhi who can help you sort out your plans. It would not be a bad idea to consult the best performance marketing agencies in India. 

While you are in charge of making your own bids, it is your competitors who determine the amount you actually need to pay to stay in competition, and the positioning of your ad. It is always a good idea to keep tabs on what the competition is upto. 

While there are multiple third party tools you can use to gain information such as average position, impression share, outranking share, etc., their data will never be as accurate and precise as the actual AdWords data that you can get from the Auction Insights report. This report is not available in your AdWord Scripts, but has to be downloaded manually. An easier way to do this is to create a simple Google Apps Script, turn the data into a format readable by the auditors and the one’s who’re working on the campaign, so that they can work towards making improvements in areas which need them.

Similar to AdWord Scripts, Google App Scripts allow you to automate sheet and chart creation as well as formatting. An average script will help you pick out your top five competitors, their highest impression share and their presence on the internet over time. 

Auction Insights lets you compare your performance with your competitors, participating in the same auction as you. Taking inputs from here, you could decide where you are doing well and where you need to put in more efforts and work aggressively. 

One of the things that you can extract from the report, is understand how active your competitors are on your brand terms. This will help you devise a bidding strategy to fight the competition and improve yourself. It also helps you ascertain if your affiliates are bidding on your brand. If they are, then you can take necessary steps to stop them from using your brand and diverting the clicks elsewhere as and when required.

This report also sheds light on your competitors and the device they are predominant on. This helps in identification of which device is being used by competitors for a specific keyword or set of keywords, which ultimately helps you form a better device strategy.

Similarly (by segmenting you can also get insight on when your competitors are more active than you. You can then decide to increase your bids during days when your competitor is active and lower your bid when they are lying low.

You could choose a keyword or a set of keywords, for which you need insights and compare your performance with that of your competition. You could filter keywords with, for e.g., high CPA and check how they are fairing. If there is less competition then you could reduce the bids and reduce the CPA, as a result. Similarly other metrics (quality score, bidding strategy, below first page etc.) could be used to filter your keywords and analyzed to identify a certain pattern.

While Google Ads management and auditing of these reports is a tedious task, there are multiple agencies offering PPC services in Delhi, such as Sociolabs, who can create master plans for taking insight-based actions, tailored for your requirements.