Our clients are often surprised and excited to hear us tell them they can see some information about their competitors within the Adwords interface.
To see who is bidding on the same keywords as you, you need to use the Auction report, and you can access it from any search campaign, adgroup or keyword report.
For each of the competing domains listed, the report will tell you stats like;
- Impression share
- Average Position
- Percentage of time their ad is above yours
- Percentage of time their ad is shown with yours
- Percentage of time they are listed at top of the page
Ways to Use The Google Auction Report
- Know your competitors – maybe you didn’t even realising they were competing so strongly with you?
- Adjust your ad copy depending on who is competing against you most strongly. Capitalise on their weaknesses – if they’re overpriced, push your low prices. If they’re unaccredited – push your accreditation. If they have no free shipping, well, you get the idea.
- Check your branded keywords – who is bidding on them? Are they above you ever? Do you want to price them out of your branded keywords?
- If you’re number 1 by far, and no one is getting close to you – you could afford to back off a bit and save some money on Google Ads
- On the other hand, if you’re way below everyone else – this could be an indication you need to get more aggressive
- If you see weird companies showing up in your report – ones you didn’t even think sold the same things as you – check what you’re bidding on, you might need to add negative keywords.
Another Interesting Report
In the same ‘details’ dropdown menu as above, you can see the ‘Search Terms’ option. This is only available on the keywords tab. You can use this report to see what people are actually searching on to arrive at your site. If your keywords are all exact match, well, this report won’t be that interesting, BUT if your keywords include phrase or broad matched, you can see something interesting. Things which have interested our clients include;
- People who arrive on their site from searching a competitors product
- Reducing waste by excluding common terms that don’t suit their business or things they don’t provide
- Different ways of describing their product – leading not only to new keywords but also new landing pages
- People looking for ‘packages’ in relation to a product, prompted a client to create an up-sell package
You never know what interesting things you’ll find in the Searched Terms report, so check it out today!
