You’re listening to the Paid Search Magic podcast, your weekly deep-dive into search engine marketing, AdWords, client management and so much more.

This is episode number 21, and I’m your host, Amy Hebdon.

 

In this week’s podcast, we’re talking about Auction Insights. This is a free tool within the AdWords interface that plenty of people have never even heard of. We’ve even got an awesome content upgrade for anyone who wants to take action on what they learn in this episode.

We cover:

• What do you mean by Auction Insights?
• How can these help you get better at AdWords?
• How do you access the tool?
• What do you do to make sense of the data?

 

 

Grab the free Auction Insights Template here, and start using this tool to gain a major competitive advantage.

Show Notes

Amy: You’re listening to the Paid Search Magic podcast, your weekly deep dive into search engine marketing, AdWords, client management and so much more. This is episode number 21, and I’m your host, Amy Hebdon.

Today, I am joined once again by my husband, James Hebdon.

James: Hello.

Amy: James, I’m going to start giving you a co-host credit in the intro.

James: Sweet.

Amy: Like, James, “I’m your co-host along with James,” but today, I actually did not do that because today, basically, you’re essentially my guest on this show. A lot of times, we’ll have episodes where you and I are both talking about a subject. In this case, I really want to interview you for your expertise on the subject, which is Auction Insights.

James: Okay.

Amy: You knew that, but what we’re going to do is we’re going to dive into this. We’ve got some really good subject-matter we’re going to go into. Then, we also have a really cool content upgrade for listeners who can go to paidsearchmagic.com/21 and grab a template that you made that really helps get additional information. Basically turn it into something that you can look, and maybe it’s nice to know, into something that’s usable that you can really get results from.

James: Yes. It’s something that can really help take the data and make it actionable.

Amy: Okay, cool. We’ll have that in the show notes, paidsearchmagic.com/21. Let’s go ahead and jump into our show.

James: All right, sounds good.

 

[bctt tweet=”You can be pretty deep into AdWords. You can be certified in AdWords and never even have seen Auction Insights on the radar. ” username=”amyppc”]

 

Amy: James, a lot of marketers aren’t very familiar with Auction Insights. You can be pretty deep into AdWords. You can be certified in AdWords and never even have seen Auction Insights on the radar. For someone who is uninitiated into the subject-matter today, could you just give us a run down on what Auction Insights is?

James: Yes, so essentially, Auction Insights is a free tool that’s available through the AdWords interface. It allows you to see certain types of data about your competitors in relation to you, in as much as your competitors who have participated in the same auctions that you have.

Amy: Okay.

James: It can be a little bit tricky to understand, but when you separate out the data over time, it’s a really good method of understanding how performance changes, why it changes.

Amy: Okay. If I haven’t ever accessed the Auction Insights section of AdWords, when I go into it, am I going to see my actual competitors? Am I going to see a benchmark of, “This is how your industry is doing compared to you?” What data can I expect to see?

James: It actually does give you the specific names of your competitors. It gives you the domain names.

Amy: Okay.

James: The data that is displayed in the UI is a little bit different than the data that is given you if you download a report on it. If you’re looking at the UI, it’s just going to give you a list of all of your competitors with whatever time period that you’ve already set. It’s just going to give you a list of the relative metrics there. If you download a report, you also have the options of segmenting it by some time dimension, right? You can segment it by day, week or month. That’s where it really gets useful because you can actually see how you’re competing with them over time.

Amy: Yes, okay, that makes sense. It gives you trends?

James: Yes. I mean one of the big problems that people have is when you’re looking at data and all of a sudden, say, your performance tanks. Usually, you’re searching for a reason why. You’re trying to figure out what have you done? Have you changed bids? Have you done something else to the account that maybe had unintended consequences? This is a great supplement to that because it can actually show you if, say, competitor pressure has increased, because sometimes, that will really impact you. Now, one thing to point out with this though is that you can go down to the keyword level, but there is a minimum amount of volume that it has to have for it to generate this information. If your brand isn’t very popular, if it’s just not searched for very often, it will just say, “Not enough data available.”

Amy: If your budget’s not bid enough if you’re bidding.

James: Yes. I mean there’s any number of things that can relate to this, but you do have to have a certain amount of volume for this data to be generated.

Amy: That’s true even at an account level, right? If your account doesn’t have sufficient data, you might not get them to show up in there.

James: Yes, yes.

Amy: Okay, cool. I go into my account. I can see my competitors. What else am I going to see about my competitors? What information is it going to give me?

James: It has impression sharing average position. Those are things that should be familiar to anybody that’s running AdWords accounts. It also has things like overlap rate, position above, top of page rate, outranking share. These are all metrics that help you to see just how competitive the people that are in the same options as you are. Say on the top of page, you can see who’s showing up above the organic listings and how often they’re doing that. Position above is a really great metric because that actually shows you how often in the Shared Auctions that you’re running that people are showing up above you, above your ads.

Amy: Position above isn’t how frequently you’re above other people. It’s how frequently your competitors are above you.

James: Correct. Now, they have another one, which is outranking share. That’s basically the opposite of that one. It’s showing how often you are above your competitors plus all the times that they didn’t show up, divided by the total number of auctions that you are eligible for.

Amy: You were earlier showing me some graphs of position above and outranking share. They’re pretty much inverse, right? When one goes up, the other one goes low and vice versa. You’re either showing above or you’re showing below. Everything’s relationship’s use. It’s going to be one or the other.

James: Right. There’s a couple key differences there though like if you actually graph them out together, the one thing that you’ll see is that they don’t add up to 100%. There’s several reasons for that. I mean the first thing is that these are just estimates. This is not using all data.

Amy: I was going to show you earlier. I logged into one of our accounts, and I looked at the Impression Share. It was 4%. It had 4% at the campaign level.

James: Really?

Amy: Yes, at an account with all the campaigns selected.

James: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amy: It does seem to vary.

James: Well, it definitely varies. Usually, when I select something, I see upwards of 50%. Anyway, it’s estimated, so it’s just based off a sample of the data, not all of the data. The other thing is, is that, say, on an outranking share. It’s actually showing how often you’re showing up above your competitors plus the number of times that they did not show up.

Amy: Which is weird to me, because if it’s looking at your competitors and someone’s not showing up, how do they factor that in? I don’t know.

James: Yes.

Amy: It’s crazy math.

James: Well, this is one of the reasons why this is such an overlooked featured. I mean just like impression share, right? It’s the fuzzy metric. What people usually think it is, it’s not. It’s much fuzzier than that. It’s based off of the auctions that you are eligible for versus the auctions you actually showed up for. This is even more complicated because say the position above rate, they don’t add in those auctions that we didn’t show up for. It’s only the auctions where you both showed up on the page. The position above rate is showing the presentence of time when you were both on the page, that your competitor was showing up above you.

Amy: Right, so if I don’t show up at all, then, I’m not eligible to get a number for that?

James: Then, it’s not factoring it into that percentage, yes.

Amy: Right. I think one thing that’s also a little bit confusing for this is sometimes, we’ll be looking at that list of competitors, and the companies on that list are not people you would, or not companies that you would consider to be competitors. Then, it’s like, “Why is Google comparing me to … I’m a service-based business, and my competitor is supposedly target.com.”

James: There can be a couple of things behind this. It depends on how tight your account is like how precise your bids are and how precise the bids are of competitors. Say if you have a really large product base-

Amy: When you say precise biz, are you talking about match type or the precision of the bid, the dollar value?

James: Yes. If somebody’s only bidding on exact terms despite even Google’s losing of what-

Amy: Sure.

James: Yes, what accounts for an exact term. For exact terms, you’re basically going to get what you’re bidding on. If you have broad terms or really lose phrase match, you can suck in a bunch of different types of queries. Anything that Google decides, A, that you’re paying enough for, and B, that the user is likely to click on, the equality is there and some amount of relevance. It’s going to pull that search query in. That might be really different from what you’re expecting. The same thing goes for your competitors. There’s that fuzziness out there where you can cross over. That’s why you might see people like Amazon or Walmart. Some of these really big advertisers that big on a ton of different keywords. Even though they’re not in your specific market, they might show up here.

Amy: Yes, so they bid on everything. They’re going to show up as my competitors even though my actual competitors may or may not be on the list.

James: Right. I mean if you have a broad term that is sucking in a lot of search queries that don’t have a lot to do with your product, then, you might get some cross over with one of these other companies. Same thing goes for them. They might have some really broad terms that are sucking in a lot of queries, including things that they may not be trying for. There’s one metric that helps you cut through this, and that’s the overlap rate. Overlap rate basically gives you an indication of just how much a competitor is overlapping with their search terms versus your search terms. One way that I like to do is you weigh it by this. Then, you only really consider the competitors that have a high overlap rate. Otherwise, you can safely discount them as just being bleed.

Amy: Okay, so it’s just outlier for that?

James: Yes.

Amy: Okay. I think you did a really good job of explaining what Auction Insights are. Is there anything else you wanted to cover there?

James: No, I think that’s about it for that part.

Amy: Okay, cool. Well, so next, I really wanted to review, basically, there’s a lot of articles. I feel like we’re always saying, “Hey, this is what everyone else is saying. This is why you need to pay attention to this other way.”

James: Well, most lists out there is just basically a regurgitated-

Amy: Right, right. You’ll get a list of metrics, but then, there’s also like, “Here’s how you can use it. It’s to evaluate your competitors.” Let’s go ahead and jump into what you can actually tell about your competitors.

James: Okay.

Amy: James, I think that there’s a tendency to want to figure out a way to make this data useful. We have all this data. We have to do something about it. That leads to I have competitor names, and I have numbers about them. I’m going to reverse engineer and extrapolate information about my competitor.

James: Right, and the truth is, is that it’s just not useful for a lot of the things that people want to do with it. I mean we’ve seen articles out there where they’re basically trying to give you … They’re actually saying, “Well, you can calculate budget for your competitors.”

Amy: Yes like, “Here’s a formula that you can use.”

James: Right. They’ve said some things like, “This may not be exactly right, but it’s directionally correct,” or something like that. The truth is, is you really cannot make that safe assumption. I mean if somebody has a 98% impression share consistently versus your 20% impression share, it’s probably a safe bet to say that they have a higher budget than you, but for you to calculate out their budget, you can’t do that for a number of reasons. The basic thing you have to understand about all of these is that this is only essentially in the intersection on the keywords where you’re both participating in auctions. That’s where this entire dataset is based on.

Amy: Right.

James: This is just a subsection of keywords. This does not have to do with all the keywords that they’re possibly bidding on. It just has to do with the keywords that you and they are bidding on actually are participating in the same auctions, right? Not only that, but there are things like quality score components, relevance across any number of keywords that can drastically change things. The best thing to use this data for, I found, are A, to pace your own performance, to try to explain dips and get more competitive if you need to. Also, frankly, this is just really interesting information for clients. That’s something that we found. It’s that clients really like to know about which domains are competing against them.

Amy: Sure. Yes, I think everyone wants to know what their competitors are doing, right? This is just human nature 101. We all want to know what’s going on in the other side of the fence. Everyone wants to be able to spy on somebody else. The idea of getting this data seems like, “Oh, I can do so much with it if I only knew what they were doing. That could somehow,” I don’t know, “Translate into a strategy.” At a certain level, it really stops making sense, but it does make sense to benchmark where you are in the landscape.

James: To do that, you really have to understand the weaknesses of the data too. This is why making calculations or anything, it’s just not possible with this data. Say you have 10,000 keywords and you have an impression share of 60%. Well, if you cut down your active keywords to, say, 2,000 that you’re actively bidding on, that you’re bidding up and you have really good quality score on all these things. You waited a while to build up some time. Then, you do a report on that data. You might expect your impression share to go down because you cut your keyword set down, but the chances are, is it’s probably going to go up, way up because all of a sudden, with your quality and your increased bids, you’re participating in way more auctions for the keyword set that you’re bidding on. That’s the key part. Now, you probably show an 80 or 90% impression share, maybe higher.

Amy: Yes. I had this little gift that I made for an article a few years ago that it said like, “Impression share doesn’t mean what you think it means. It has a theater with just one person in it. You can have 100% impression share, but your goal is” … I don’t want to say your goal is a full theater, or your goal is to get as many people as possible, but it just can be a really misleading metric because you see that number go up. You’re like, “I’m succeeding,” but it doesn’t really mean that.

James: Well, I mean let’s face it. Impression share is like the scourge of client managers, especially if a client gets wind of it because they want more impression share. They want to be showing up. They don’t want their competitors to be showing up more than they are, but it’s such a fuzzy metric that it’s really meaningless. I mean again, if you wanted to show your impression share increase, then, cut out some of your keywords. This is, I think, especially problematic in a lot of situations because we tend to have accounts where we’re bidding on way too many keywords. There are people who literally have standards of account growth by just how many keywords get added. That’s not a good measure. You should be looking at which queries you’re showing up for, first of all, not keywords in particular and how well those queries are performing for you.

Amy: I won’t just be bashing on impression share because it can be valuable. You can use it to say, “Hey, look, we’re below 20% impression share because we’re so limited by budget.” You’re leaving traffic on the table. Then, it can help guide those conversations. I had a client that was trying to plan their budgets based on impressions share like, “If we add $4,200 this month to this campaign, then, we’ll hit 100%.” They’re really frustrated. They were doing it themselves. “How can we hit those numbers?” Well, because you’re no going to. That’s not how it works.

James: You have a client like that, and for anybody who’s collecting a percentage of spend, it’s a really easy way to have them perpetually increase their budget, right?

Amy: Right. “Well, it’s still not 100% yet.”

James: “Well, let me add a few keywords. Oh, it’s lower? Okay.”

Amy: Right. Well, I think one thing that’s important to note about Auction Insights, and Google says this on their support page. If Google’s saying this, I think it’s worth listening to. We have a clip of a robot. It’s reading it. That would be nice.

Computer Voice: This report provides information on other advertisers who participated in the same auctions as you. This doesn’t indicate that the other advertisers have the same advertising settings as you. The other advertisers’ metrics shown are based only on instances when your ads were also estimated to be eligible to appear. This report won’t reveal the actual keywords, quality, bids or settings from your campaigns. It won’t give you insight into the same information for others.

Amy: How is this going to compare to an SEMrush or a SpyFu or any other paid competitor tool, because those will give you actual numbers? Are those better then? Should we ignore Auction Insights?

James: Anybody who’s ever used SEMrush, any paid search manager who’s used SEMrush or any of those competitor tools and have looked at what their estimate for their monthly budgets are, I have never heard anybody say that they’re even close.

Amy: To their own accounts?

James: To their own accounts, right, where you actually know what your budgets are. It’s nothing against those guys. Those guys have models that they’ve built up to try and estimate these things. They don’t have the data though. These are all estimates based on faulty assumptions, essentially. They try to give you the best information they can, and there might be some value in the relative nature of those numbers, but they’re definitely not exact. At least with Auction Insights, this actually reflects the data. Now, it’s a subset of the data. It’s an approximation of the data, and it’s conceptually tricky to handle, but it is at least the actual data.

Amy: That was really well-said. Let’s talk about how you use Auction Insights. Let me just say that if there’s a question that comes up that involves any competitive information, I will turn to you to get Auction Insights data delivered basically on a silver platter. I will hand it over to clients. They will love it and rave about it and say, “Thank you so much for this information.” What do you do with Auction Insights that turns it from like, “Oh. Well, that’s interesting,” to “oh, that’s really useful.”

James: Circling back to where you actually get this data, when you look at it in the Ui, you’re setting the time period that you want to look at. You’re selecting whatever specific data that you’re interested in, whether it’s at the account level, the campaign level, accurate keyword, whatever. Now, one you’ve done that, it’s going to give you a list of the domain names of your competitors and these metrics, these six metrics. You can’t segment it within the UI by time or anything else, but you can download a report. When you do that, it has one option to segment it by time. What I’ll typically do is when you make a request like that, I’ll select the account or the campaign or whatever, download the report, segment it by day for the past 30 days just to get a good snapshot of any recent performance. Then, I just put together a template. It’s essentially a Google Sheet where I can dump that data into one of the tabs.

Then, it goes through, and it transforms it into a more useful data visualization. It puts together charts. It groups the different metrics together by type. It also ranks the competitors, and then only includes the top four, because when you include all the competitors, especially for some accounts when it can have 80 competitors, try to graph that together, and it’s just going to be a bunch of wiggly spaghetti lines.

Amy: Yes, it’s way too much.

James: Yes. It makes it a lot easier to analyze and see trends of your biggest competitors.

Amy: Yes. The thing that I really like about it, to be honest, I have clients or I’m involved with, let’s say, companies who have other vendors who are doing paid search for them, right? A lot of the times, the vendors will just say, “Well, costs are at … CPCs are at …” The client has no idea. “Are CPCs up? Are you just mismanaging my budget? What actually is happening?” There’s always that curiosity or maybe question about, “How is this actually doing?” They get tired of hearing, “Oh, well, CPCs are up. CPCs are on the rise. Costs are up,” but when you can actually see, “Oh, we’re in fourth position compared to everyone else. We used to be in second. We’re not doing as well. We’re not paying as much. Maybe we need to increase.” It just helps to tell a story so much better than just saying, “Well, costs are up,” and having that be it.

James: No, absolutely. I mean without any information like that, a client is going to assume that, “Well, what did you do different? Why is performance down?” I mean I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that thing. “What did you do differently?” It’s like, “Make it go back to the way that it was.”

Amy: Right. “Reverse time.”

James: I literally haven’t looked at your account for a week, so …

Amy: No, that’s never happened.

James: No, that was just a joke for … I’ve seen other people do that. No, seriously, it’s like when you look at this data, you can look and see your average position drop or your average CPC just go through the roof. There may not have been any big changes. I mean you don’t want to be changing this stuff every single day. Over the course of two weeks, if suddenly, your performance just drops, if you don’t have a good explanation for that, maybes, maybe this happened. Maybe that happened. It’s not going to say the issue to the client.

Amy: Right, and one of the things that you’ve been … We’ve had a client. This has been especially relevant lately. It’s showing new competitors coming into the market where you can just show over time, they weren’t anywhere. All of a sudden, they’re here. Here’s where they are two weeks from now. It really helps to understand the landscape in a way that there’s no better way to communicate that then just showing them. Just dart it and then leave or spend more. Not spend more but show up more frequently to really help to motivate decisions and strategy based on what’s happening in the landscape.

James: Well, absolutely. I mean if I can make one recommendation to AdWords, it would be to honestly integrate this data into the larger UI so that you could graph competitor data on top of normal metrics, but you can’t do that right now. The best that you can do is take this data. Transform it yourself and look at it over time. Honestly, when we started doing this more, I was surprised by how often it would explain shifts in performance on an account.

Amy: Do you think it would be an exaggeration to call this a magic template?

James: No, of course not.

Amy: Oh, I was thinking it would be, but it’s not. It’s a clever name. I just thought of it. We’re calling it the Auction Insights template. Maybe it’s magic.

James: One thing you can’t see on podcasts are when somebody rolls their eyes.

Amy: You’re just lying. You’re never going to know that’s what happened?

James: That may or may not have happened in this case.

Amy: Magic or not, it’s still very, very useful to be able to get visualization. It’s not always the most actionable thing. There are other aspects that you can look at in an account that are going to tell you immediately what you should change, but I feel like to get client buy-in, I don’t know many other things that can motivate a client to approve what you’re recommending or to take action than to say, “Look at this chart of your competitors’ clobbering you.” That’s going to motivate them to do something different. I think your decision to share out the template, let’s be honest, that’s super generous of you-

James: It really is, yes.

Amy: To be able to use this as a content upgrade. Normally, in our show notes, you can go get the resources and just get additional information. In this case, we’re actually including the template. That’s going to be a content upgrade, so just enter in your e-mail. It will get sent to you. Also, we’ll be building out a little video training for it as well so that in case you get overwhelmed by just by what the Excel sheet looks like, you have the training that will go through it step-by-step.

James: It’s just downloading this data and copying, pasting it from Excel over to Google sheets. Then, the template does the rest.

Amy: Well, I like it. I think that everyone’s going to like it.

James: I hope so.

Amy: Go to paidsearchmagic.com/21, and you’ll be able to access that template on your own.

James: Yes. Can I just say one more use case that I think is really interesting here?

Amy: Yes, you can.

James: Something we didn’t cover is that since you can select any campaign or keyword or whatever, one of the most interesting use cases for this is when you’re running a brand campaign, is to see what your competitors are actually bidding on your brand terms. Say if you have a bunch of your exact terms with the really exact brand term, select that. Run option insights on it. If you have several competitors come up there, and the overlap rate is high, then, you can safely assume that they are likely bidding on your brand.

Amy: Definitely showing up and likely bidding on. There are cases where you could show up without directly bidding on.

James: There are cases like that, but it’s unlikely because it would have to be if they had broad keywords that somehow were sucking in your brand terms. If you have a brand that is composed of common search terms, then, that can be more of a problem than there’s more of a question because people could just be searching on those other things. People could be bidding on the search terms, but if your brand is a unique name like Kleenex, there’s not much that people are going to be mistaken for that.

Amy: Okay.

James: Kleenex isn’t probably the best example since it’s become a generalized brand, but you know what I mean. Just having a specific brand that you can get an indication of, which of your competitors are specifically bidding on your brand or likely bidding on your brand.

Amy: Right, likely.

James: Yes. I’ve found that clients are extremely interested in that sort of thing.

Amy: I actually have an account right now where I cannot bid the brand name because it’s a franchise for a corporation. We’re definitely showing up in those search terms, but that doesn’t mean that we’re bidding on the brand name of our own brand. It just means that we’re showing up there because it’s really relevant to the names in the headline. You just can’t bid on it. That’s really in for who’s bidding on what with 100% accuracy?

James: Well, and that actually brings up one other really key thing. It’s that you can bid down to, say, the keyword level. What I was going to say is if you could big on your brand exact so that, say, somebody might be bidding on, somebody might be searching for your brand plus some other product, right? Then, you have a competitor that’s just bidding on the product, but they show up with your brand in it. They’re not bidding on your brand, but their ads are still showing up when somebody’s bidding on your brand plus this general product. You could run Auction Insights on the exact keyword of your brand name without any other products, and that would be a better indication that they actually are bidding on the brand.

Amy: Okay. Well, thank you so much for being my guest. I don’t even know how to phrase this. The James and Amy Show, featuring James.

James: I think it’s the Amy and James Show, isn’t it?

Amy: Right.

James: The [Jamy 00:26:55] Show.

Amy: No.

James: Come on.

Amy: Anyway, thank you for letting us get access to additional information about Auction Insights. Thanks for sharing all that. Thank you for sharing the template. I think people are going to find it really useful. We will be back next week with an interview with Supermetrics.

James: Yes. It’s my pleasure. If you guys have any questions, please feel free to e-mail it to us. You can reach us at Amy or James@paidsearchmagic or ads@paidsearchmagic or drop us-

Amy: .com. Don’t forget about the .com.

James: .com, yes. Paidsearchmagic.com.

Amy: It’s not-

James: or drop in or go to the website and chat with us there.

Amy: Okay, awesome. Thanks so much.

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