The Auction Insights report is a tool from Google Ads, which allows advertisers to compare their keyword bid performance against competitors in the same auctions. We’ve talked about how to use the Auction Insights report in a previous blog but did you know you can now view this data with Google Data Studio? This is a really powerful way to automate competitor insights from within Data Studio, allowing you to see your competitors and how well you’re performing against them.
Creating the Auctions Insight Report in Data Studio
To begin, create a new table and add your Google Ads account as the data source.
Set the dimension to Campaign and select Impr. share, Top of page rate, Abs top of page rate, Search Lost IS (Rank) and Search Lost IS (Budget) as the metrics and you should then see a table like this:
Google offers a full definition of each of these metrics here if you would like some additional info.
This table shows you the performance of your campaigns for each of these key metrics. We also like to add a comparison to the previous month to show us if these key metrics have improved or not. However, this table only shows you data for your set date range, so we would recommend adding a Time Series chart showing key metrics, such as impression share, over a longer period. To create this add a new Time Series chart (connected to your Google Ads Data Source) and add Month as the Dimension and Impr. Share as the metric:
Remember to add a drop-down filter set to Campaign to this table so that you can see the impression share for each campaign over your set time period (remembering to group together all the items you want to filter by campaign.)
Seeing Competitor Data
The last widget we recommend is a table showing the performance of each of your competitors. To do this add a new table and select Auction Insights – Domain as your dimension and add the following as your metrics:
- Imp. Share
- Position Above Rate
- Top of Page Rate
- Abs. Top of Page Rate
- Outranking Share
Group this table to the campaign drop-down filter we mentioned above and you’ll be able to see how your competitors are performing against you in each individual campaign (and ass always we recommend adding a comparison to the previous month).
You may notice the highlighted row in the above table. We’ve blocked out the name of the competitors shown in this specific table, but you’ll notice that the highlighted row is blank for this dimension. That’s due to how the Google Ads data is imported into Data Studio so data will pull through will with an empty Auction Insight – Domain value. Therefore, for this client, we’ve added a bit of Conditional Formatting to highlight this data so it’s always easy for the client to find their data.
GlowTip!
If you’ve set up your Data Studio report a while ago and try to add the Dimensions and Metrics listed in this blog you may find that they aren’t there. Don’t panic, it’s more than likely due to an old data source before this data was available in Data Studio. Simply, add your Google Ads as a new data source and they should pull through.
Hopefully, this short guide has given you a better understanding of how to add Auction Insights data into your Google Data Studio reports. Please feel free to leave a comment/question below or contact us via contact@glowmetrics.com. For more on data visualisation and Google Data Studio, you can check out other Data Studio articles on the GlowMetrics blog or follow us on @GlowMetrics for more tips, guides, and up to date news in the world of Digital Analytics and Marketing.
Posted by
Nicola Russell
Nicola is the Digital Team Lead at GlowMetrics, preparing and executing PPC & SEO strategies for new and existing clients. Nicola specialises in integrated marketing campaigns, combining the best of paid social and paid search to get the finest of results for her clients
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