As James Bond said, “In poker, you never play your hand. You play the man across from you.”
Admittedly, a career in Paid Search has fewer speedboats and shootouts than a career as a secret agent, but we do have our own villains to battle - other marketers running the accounts we’re competing against.
Luckily, like 007, we have a few tools at our disposal to help us understand what our competitors are doing and where we should be focusing our efforts. Alongside the Ads Transparency Centre and some excellent third-party tools, we also have the Auction Insights report, which provides a clear view of competitor activity and how their strategies evolve over time.
With detailed information about each competitor’s Impression Share and how it changes over time, reviewing this data should be a straightforward task, leading to clear, actionable insights for clients - right?
Well, sort of.
The problem I keep seeing with Auction Insights analysis is that only focuses on one column - overall Impression Share. While this is a great metric to understand general visibility, it doesn’t account for the tactical tweaks to a strategy and if broad coverage is being sacrificed for higher position. Instead, we should be looking at Overall, Top and Absolute Top Impression Share together to understand exactly what competitors are doing and how their approach is evolving as they tweak their account.
Let’s look at some examples.
Scenario 1: Every Metric Has Increased
A simple one to start with. We look in the Auction Insights report to see that a competitor has increased across every type of Impression Share. It’s clear what’s happening—they’ve increased their budgets to raise total coverage while adopting a more aggressive bidding strategy to appear higher on the results page.
This is a tough situation to optimise for. Unless you also have additional budget, you risk burning through your spend trying to keep up while CPC and CPA continuously rise. Instead, focus on your top performing keywords where you can afford some inefficiency. There’s no point in trying to compete on everything so pick your battles and hang on until your competitor starts to pull back.
Scenario 2: Broader Coverage With Less Aggressive Bidding
Here, we see a competitor is increasing their total Impression Share but their Top and Absolute Top Impression Share is dropping away. In this situation, it’s likely that they’re operating with the same budget but have made a strategic decision to increase coverage while sacrificing their top spot on the results page.
In this situation, automated bidding is your friend. A strategy like Max Conversions will work well to combat this by focusing budget and visibility on searches likely to convert while pulling back on those that won’t generate results. You don’t need to compete for 100% of the search volume - only for users ready to convert.
Scenario 3: Less Coverage With More Aggressive Bidding
This is the other direction your competitor could have gone. In this scenario, they’ve sacrificed broad Impression Share and are instead focusing their budget on maximising visibility for a smaller number of searches. Given that overall Impression Share has decreased, it’s likely that their total budget has remained stable but it’s worth keeping an eye on how much Top & Absolute Top Impression Share increases to confirm this.
A change like this tends to mean your competitor is testing out a new automated bid strategy focused on efficient conversions so the previous solution doesn’t apply. Instead, look at how you can efficiently allocate budget to ensure that your ads are appearing more often than your competitors. You don’t need to outbid them if they’re not appearing in the auction, so a Target Impression Share strategy set well above their current level will mean you can guarantee that a certain percentage of your ads won’t be impacted by your competitor’s aggressive bid strategy - just keep an eye on conversion efficiency.
Scenario 4: Every Metric Has Decreased
It seems like a dream scenario - that competitor you’ve been battling against for months has started to drop out of the auction completely. Their overall Impression Share has steadily decreased along with reductions to Top & Absolute Top Impression Share.
When this happens, it’s important to ask why. Why would a business suddenly stop running ads on a platform that can generate strong results and reaches people at the exact moment they’re searching for something?
The first thing to do is to look at the performance of your own campaigns. If it’s not great, perhaps your competitor has seen the same thing in their account and made the call that Google Ads isn’t right for them and their marketing budget is better spent elsewhere. Hopefully not, so the next step is analysing Auction Insights for another set of campaigns. Perhaps your competitor has decided to discontinue Product A and is starting to push Product B - in that case you’ll see Scenario 1 when you review that set of campaigns and you can start to take action.
Auction Insights is a powerful tool but so many marketers only use a fraction of the data available to them. Reviewing every column and how they interact together helps to paint a vivid picture of what competitors are doing in their accounts and where their strategy is headed. Using this information enables smarter optimisation decisions and ensure you continue to drive results, regardless of how competitive the auction gets.
For data driven Paid Search solutions, get in touch.