Google roll out new “Auction Insights” feature for AdWords

It looks like the Google team have yet again been busy behind the scenes looking for ways to help AdWords advertisers get more transparency into their campaigns, with the new “Auction Insights” feature being rolled out across all accounts this week.

The new “Auction Insights” feature basically allows you to quickly view any data that you would previously only have been only to obtain by crawling the Google search results for your keywords, giving users insight into how your ads are being displayed in comparison to your competitors.

New reported metrics:

• Impression Share (How often your ad appears for the specified keyword as a percentage).
• Average Position (Your average ad position compared with competitors).
• Overlap Rate (How often a competitor received an impression at the same time as you).
• Position above rate (How often a competitor ranked above you in the search results).
• Top of page rate (How often either you or a competitor had their ad at the top of the page rather than the right hand side).

So, how do I access this new report?

To view this report, first click the tick box next to any keyword within your keyword reports that display the graph symbol as shown below:

Once this is ticked, it’s simply a matter of clicking the “Keyword details” button just above your keyword list, and selecting “Auction Insights” in the drop down:

Here’s a screenshot of the report in action: 

And how will this report help me to achieve greater AdWords performance?

This data becomes extremely useful in highly competitive verticals, as it allows you to see exactly how you’re performing in terms of exposure and ad position compared to your competitors. If there is a particular keyword that you know to be highly successful and vital to your campaign, this report will allow you to ensure that your ads are being shown more than your competitors, and in a higher ad position on the search page.

Additionally, you might want to use this tool to identify keywords that some of your competitors are targetting aggressively. If there is a particular competitor putting focus into a keyword that you haven’t tested heavily, could there be a reason for this? It might be that this competitor knows something you don’t!

It’s great to see that Google are still constantly looking at ways of improving the performance and user experience of their AdWords tool. I look forward to seeing what more they have in stall for us in the near future!

Have you tested out the new ‘Auction Insights’ feature in AdWords yet? If so please feel free to leave a comment and let me know how you’ve found it so far.