Making An Impression: Understanding The Auction Insights Report

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.

Staying Present: December Account Management

Black Friday is over and, hopefully, we’ve all seen positive results in our accounts. Weeks of preparation making sure campaigns are set up correctly, offers are in place and the site is working as planned have paid off with a significant bump to revenue and a boost to Q4 results.

It’s important to take a moment to reflect and enjoy the results of the hard work but we can’t relax for too long because the next challenge is already here - ensuring we make the most of December and all the sales that come with it.

With so many factors at play, managing accounts in December is completely different from any other month with a range of considerations to maximise the chances of success. Luckily, none of these are overly complicated by themselves but it’s how they work together that can make the difference.

This week, let’s look at the major points to consider when managing your account for positive December results.

1) Budget Pacing

Perhaps the most important thing to get right in December is accurately pacing your budget based on demand and the logistics of your business. When you think about the unique trends over the course of the month, the normal method of dividing spend by available days and steadily pacing quite literally doesn’t add up.

With the Black Friday weekend extending into the first few days of December and customers getting their Christmas shopping out of the way in the first half of the month, we need to take a more active approach to pacing than we normally would. Accounting for these weekly trends is crucial to make sure we have enough budget to support search volume and so we don’t leave any revenue on the table.

Rather than pacing steadily, a smarter approach is to weight your budget heavily towards the first two weeks of the month. By the time we’re a week out from Christmas, sales decrease significantly and businesses can’t guarantee that orders will arrive in time to be under the tree on Christmas morning. Focusing on periods where search volume and sales intent is highest will mean maximum performance for your account without having to scramble for sales.

2) Factoring In Competition

It’s not just about how much budget you have to spend, it’s also about how efficiently you can spend it. We’ve talked at length about how the auction space is becoming more competitive every year and Christmas is a great example of this with a higher number of competitors who are increasingly proficient at managing their accounts.

When reviewing budgets for December, be sure to factor in that CPCs will be far higher than normal and forecast accordingly. Without accounting for this, it’s nearly impossible to operate efficiently and meet your targets. We already know that conversion rate will be much higher in the leadup to Christmas so a higher CPC can be easily balanced by an increase in sales & revenue if the account is managed correctly.

Don’t be afraid to highlight this and ask for additional budget, backed up by account data, to ensure that you can stay competitive and get the results you need.

3) Scheduling Changes

By the time Christmas arrives, even the most motivated marketer is running on empty. They’ve spent the last two months setting up, optimising and reporting on campaigns during the busiest retail period of the year. With so much going on, it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks and for errors to appear.

A simple way to guard against this is to use scheduling options to ensure that things happen when they’re meant to. When setting up campaigns, ad copy or promotions, take a moment to create a rules ensuring these finish at the appropriate time. Having an ad talking about your Christmas discounts and same-day shipping options is great, unless it’s running on the 26th of December!

The peace of mind in knowing that your Christmas ads and campaigns will pause when they need to is well worth the extra hour that it will take to set these up across the account during the planning stage and will mean no nasty surprises when you log on in January.

December brings so much opportunity to our accounts but also brings its own unique challenges. Considering the things which make this month different and what you need to do to set your accounts up for success will mean a strong end to 2024 and a relaxing, well-earned holiday once it’s all said and done.

To get your accounts Christmas ready, get in touch.

Getting Defensive: The Case For Paid Search Brand Campaigns

At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s tough out there for Paid Search marketers. Budgets are being slashed, targets remain as high as ever and our clients have increasingly sophisticated knowledge of Paid Search which leads to tougher questions for those running the accounts. With such a challenging financial climate, there’s one question that comes up over and over again.

Why are we paying to bid on our own brand name?

On the surface, this question makes sense. Brand spend can make up a significant chunk of an account’s total budget and, hopefully, the SEO team are doing the right things to make sure that the official site appears in top position when a new customer makes a search. If you’re already appearing at the top of the results page, does that mean that these campaigns are a redundant tactic?

Not quite - here’s a few good reasons why Brand is still an important part of Paid Search strategy.

1) Competition

A well executed SEO strategy will put a business at the top of the organic listings, but it can’t do anything about what happens above that in the paid results.

Picture this: you’re a Paid Search marketer battling it out for conversions in a competitive industry. One day you’re looking at the Auction Insights report and you notice that one of your main competitors has completely vanished from the graph. What’s your next move?

If you’re anything like me, you’d immediately push budget into a campaign bidding on their brand name with the goal of stealing clicks, conversions and market share while their campaigns are turned off. Sure, some of those searchers will scroll down to the Organic listing but if you’re in an industry where products are comparable between businesses you’re almost guaranteed to steal some customers and grow your own brand.

On the flip side, if you’re a business that’s turned off your Brand ads, you lose valuable data from Auction Insights about what your competitors are doing with your brand name and how the market is changing. Without this information, you need to rely on third party tools that don’t give you the full picture of what’s happening in the search space.

2) Extending Your Reach

A deceptively simple one here - a Paid Search ad with all the extensions applied takes up more physical space on the results page. With this in place, competitors will be pushed down below the fold, meaning more likelihood of a click coming through to your business even if competitors are heavily bidding on your own brand name.

Alongside taking up space, making use of extensions means that you can share additional messaging that would be lost if you were solely relying on an Organic listing. Relevant sitelinks, promo extensions and contact details give extra information to searchers that might just push them over the line into paying customers.

3) Sending A Message

One of the most underrated elements of Brand campaigns is the ability to rapidly change messaging in a way that’s not possible with SEO. Changing site titles and descriptions can be a major task and there’s very few SEO marketers who are going to recommend this on a regular basis given the risk of reduction in site rank and time needed for post-change analysis.

In contrast, through Paid ads we can update our Brand messaging within the space of a few minutes to make sure that we’re calling out the most relevant details for that point in time. Combined with the relevant extensions we’ve talked about earlier, this amplifies our presence and gives us another angle to reach our customers in a way that’s risk free for our SEO team.

With that said, there’s validity to the question of how efficient Brand ads are. The best approach is to test different levels of visibility and work out what’s most effective for you. In some cases, running at an Impression Share of 20-30% will help to save budget while ensuring enough visibility that competitors decide it’s not worth competitively bidding on your brand name. In other cases, you might need to keep your 100% Impression Share target and focus on other ways to improve cost efficiency through bid adjustments and negative keywords.

If your client decides to pause Brand ads completely, it’s crucial to keep a close eye on analytics tools to measure the uplift in traffic and conversion volume. The best case scenario is that Organic picks up the slack but, more likely, there will be a 10-20% gap where competitors are stealing clicks that they wouldn’t have got previously. If this happens, use the data to make a case for why Brand should remain part of the account and look at how this can run most efficiently.

For smarter Brand Paid Search, get in touch.

Peak Period: A Marketer's Survival Guide

As another year starts to wind down, everyone is looking forward to some time off. Christmas and New Year holidays are booked in and projects start to get put in the “let’s look at this next year” basket. It’s a time with reflection of the year that’s been and planning for the year that’s to come - unless you’re a digital marketer.

For marketers, this is a period of high pressure and even higher expectations. Black Friday approaches with targets that are more ambitious than last year and there’s barely time to catch your breath before pushing hard for sales in the leadup to Christmas. Everyone is in the same boat so competition is intense and one bad day can mean disaster for even the most well run account.

There’s plenty of advice on the technical side of this period and how to approach things. Getting a remarketing strategy in place, making sure bid strategies are set correctly and getting your ad scheduling correct has been discussed at length. What hasn’t been touched on is the human side - how can marketers protect themselves and their mental health to make sure that the pressure of this period doesn’t overwhelm them and spill over into their life outside work?

This week, we’ll look at a few things marketers can do to set themselves up for success in an increasingly difficult and draining environment.

1) Setting Structure & Priorities

Losing control and working reactively is a major cause of anxiety for marketers. Constantly being on the back foot means you spend your time chasing your tail and, ultimately, leads to burned out marketers doing work that falls short of their own standards which leads to even more anxiety.

During peak period, it’s critical to approach each day with a clear structure in place. Knowing what to expect and where to focus energy means you work in a proactive way and can be sure you’re tackling the main challenges that come up rather than focusing energy on things that aren’t going to make a measurable difference.

We’ve all struggled with an impossible task list and wondered where to start. This peak period, order your task list by the impact each will have and tune out anything that isn’t going to move the needle. Unexpected issues will always pop up but, by being clear about what you need to accomplish, it’s so much easier to find the space to address and solve these problems as they occur.

2) Using Support Structures

On most accounts we’ll work as a part of a team with skilled marketers filling different roles to drive the account forward. That team isn’t just there to support the client - it’s also there to support each other and step in when things become too much for one person to handle.

During peak period, we should be checking in with our team at least once a day to understand what everyone has on, where they’re at with their priorities and the support each person needs. If things are becoming too much, reach out for support. It’s best to be clear about the specific support and resource that you need so that it can be allocated appropriately. This is a team sport and it’s in everyone’s best interests to make sure all members are supported and motivated by the work they’re doing.

3) Accept What You Can’t Control

At a certain point, we’ve done everything we can. The budgets are set, the ads are updated and the technical side of the account is in place. While there are always small optimisations that can happen, the account is going to perform how it’s going to perform.

With such intense pressure and constant communication, there’s a temptation to constantly check the account and let anxiety and stress spill over into your life outside of work. Every marketer I’ve spoken to has fallen into this pattern before and it’s much easier said than done to step away from the account.

With that said, setting clear boundaries between work and life is so important during this period. A tired, burned out marketer is no good to anyone - particularly themselves. Taking breaks to rest and reset means that you come back to the account energised and with fresh ideas that can help get those incremental gains that you might have otherwise missed. If you do have to check in on the account outside of hours, set a timer and be strict about closing the laptop once it’s finished.

The stress and anxiety from peak period lasts a lot longer than peak period itself so any approach to maintain composure can only help in the long run. Trust yourself, your skills and the work that you’ve done and know that you’ll see the payoff in the account and in positive feedback from your client. Setting priorities during this period is so important but don’t forget the biggest one - yourself and your mental health.

For marketing support during peak period, get in touch.