Auction insights, Google’s tool for comparing your performance with other advertisers, is amazing. We’ve written about it in these parts before and we’ve even spoken about it at Hero Conf (as part of the Sizing Up the Competition panel).
They’re powerful, and it’s sort of crazy that Google is even willing to share that information with all of us. It makes sense, as being able to see what your competition is doing should theatrically ramp up your own level of competitiveness, but it’s still so much information for us to have. It is great, and I remain grateful to have it.
The big news is that now we have even more Auction insights.
Google recently announced that we are now going to have more ways to look at this information. It used to be only one keyword per time, but not anymore, hombre. Here’s what we’ve got now:
Groups of keywords
Select whichever keywords you want and see how the Auction insights stats come back for them. Google gave the idea of pulling them for all keywords you have labeled a certain way, and that is a good idea if I do say so myself. Like Auction Insights, labels are awesome. (Please put them in the next update of AdWords Editor.)
Individual or multiple ad groups
That’s right, folks. This baby is now available on the ad group tab.
There’s now a new Details button that has magically appeared on the tab, and you can download for a selection of ad groups or simply All. The new Details button will be there even if you aren’t in looking at ad groups within a certain campaign, which means you can see Auction insights for your entire account at one fell swoop.
Individual or multiple campaigns
That’s right! The Details button is now also appearing on your campaign tabs. This is so cool.
Google is hosting a hang out about Auction insights on June 25th, 2013, in case you want to share your joy with the rest of the world. I just checked the guest list and my frequent webinar co-host Larry Kim is going to be in the house so I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.
I’ve talked before about the really cool things that you can do with the Auction insights report on a keyword-by-keyword basis (which I linked to before, but just for the heck of it, here it is again). Slice up your date ranges and see what changes with the competition.
Now, with ad group- and campaign-level Auction insights you should be able to get a couple of new and exciting ways to see your competition’s behavior.
1. Their match type strategy.
Now this one will take some gerrymandering, as Google’s own definition says that you can’t see match types in the Auction insights report, but you can now take a look at groups of exact keywords and see how the metrics change when compared to their phrase and broad counterparts. If you have a healthy set of embedded negatives you’ll be able to see how the competition stacks up against your match types. It’ll be up to you to read between the lines about what that means from your competition, as their exact matches could be in your phrase auctions (and all of the other variations of that scenario that you surely don’t need spelled out).
2. Identify your biggest competition by keyword type.
Most of my campaigns are broken down by keyword type, meaning that the different synonyms that appear all over our accounts and their different meaning can have budget allocated accordingly. Even if you have all of your non-branded search in one big campaign, you can just do this by ad group (guys, can we all just take a moment to be so happy that this is now available in so many different places? {Pause} All right, thank you.).
Watch how the different metrics in the report change as you cycle through your synonyms. Identify which competition has the best coverage and set your sights on them. If they have all of your keywords covered, do they possibly have keywords in their account that you’re missing out on? Find the most diligent of your competition and get on their case.
Finding out which competitors are focusing on which terms will also give you loads of ammunition for your ad testing. If they are bidding aggressively on a certain set of terms, start boasting about what you do better in your ads for those keywords and claim that space.
With campaigns and ad groups now having Auction insights, we have the ability to start at a high level and drill down to see just how we measure up. It’s pretty sweet. It’s also brand new, so we’ll be looking for new and exciting ways to use this expanded functionality in the days ahead. Let us know if you think of anything exciting!
