Flight log / Transmission 035

Google Ads auction insights: how to read the room

Every Google Ads auction has other people in the room, and Google won't tell you their bids. It will tell you 6 things about them on Search, as long as your own impression share clears 10%.

Most paid search reports describe your account in isolation. Your CPC went up, your impression share went down, your conversions dipped. Auction insights is the one report that adds the other half of the story: who else was bidding when it happened.

It won't hand you a competitor's keyword list or budget. What it does give you is enough to tell the difference between "we got worse" and "someone new showed up," which are two very different problems with two very different fixes.

What is auction insights in Google Ads?

Auction insights is a report inside Google Ads that compares your performance with other advertisers who participated in the same auctions you did. Each row is another advertiser, listed by domain, next to a row for your own account. Google's help page says it lets you compare your performance with other advertisers and can help with bidding and budgeting decisions.

Three things make it useful. It covers your actual auctions rather than a third-party estimate. It can be run at campaign, ad group or keyword level. And for Search and Shopping it can be segmented by time and device, which is where most of the real insight lives.

It's worth being clear about the scope up front. Every number is relative to the auctions your campaign entered. A competitor's figures in your report describe how they showed up in your auctions, not how big they are overall.

What do the auction insights metrics mean?

Google lists 6 statistics for Search campaigns and 3 for Shopping. Here's what each one measures, in plain terms.

Impression share is the headline number and the one people misread most. Google says eligibility depends on targeting, approval status and Quality Score, so your impression share is a measure of how much of your own addressable auction you won. Google notes that a competitor's impression share in your report can differ from what they see in their own account, because the auctions they're eligible for only partly overlap yours.

The chart below shows how a hypothetical B2B software account's report might look for one Search campaign over a month. Treat the shape as illustrative, not a benchmark.

In that hypothetical, you're the most visible advertiser, but Competitor A is close behind. Impression share alone can't tell you whether A is beating you head to head or simply showing in auctions you skip. That's what the next two metrics are for.

Where do you find auction insights, and which campaigns support it?

Google's documented path is short:

1. Open Campaigns, Ad groups or Search keywords in the Campaigns menu.
2. Check the box next to the campaign, ad group or keyword you want to analyze.
3. Select Auction insights.

If your selection mixes campaign types, Google asks you to choose Search campaigns or Shopping campaigns from a dropdown. Keyword reports are limited to the keywords on one page at a time unless you run the report for all keywords.

Campaign type support, per Google's help page as of October 2026:

• Search: all 6 metrics, at campaign, ad group and keyword level.
• Shopping: impression share, overlap rate and outranking share. Google says Shopping auction insights come only from the Search Network.
• Performance Max: auction insights for the Search and Shopping ads it serves, segmented by Search and Shopping, at the account and campaign level. There's no asset group or keyword view.

Two thresholds explain most empty reports. Items need a minimum amount of activity in the selected date range, and Google says the report doesn't show insights when impression share is below 10%. Search partners are also excluded, because they don't distinguish top from other positions.

How do you read overlap rate and outranking share together?

A single month of auction insights is a photo. The useful version is a time series. Segment the report by week or month, pick the 2 or 3 competitors that matter, and chart overlap rate against your outranking share.

Here's a hypothetical: for the first 4 weeks, Competitor A shows up in roughly 1 in 5 of your auctions and you outrank them about 70% of the time. Then something changes.

From week 5, A appears in more than twice as many of your auctions and your outranking share drops from about 70% to under 50%. That's the signature of a competitor who raised bids, expanded match types or added budget on your terms. Nothing in your account changed, but your CPCs and impression share would both feel it.

The combinations are more useful than any single number:

That last row matters. Auction insights is often opened to find someone to blame. Half the time the report says nobody else changed, which is a useful answer too.

What do position above rate and top of page rate tell you?

Position above rate shows how often a competitor's ad sat above yours when you both showed. Top of page rate and absolute top of page rate show how often each advertiser made it above the organic results, and how often they were the very first ad.

Put the two position metrics side by side for the main competitors and the picture gets sharper. In this illustrative example, everyone reaches the top of the page fairly often, but Competitor A takes the first slot far more than anyone else.

Is chasing the first slot worth it? It depends on your economics, not on pride. The first position usually costs more per click. If your conversion rate and lead quality hold in second or third, letting a competitor pay for the top spot can be the right call. If you sell into a category where buyers click the first credible option, it may not be.

How should you use auction insights to make decisions?

The report is diagnostic. It tells you where to look, not what to bid. A routine that works in most B2B accounts:

1. Start at campaign level, by week. Pick your top 3 to 5 spend campaigns, segment by week over the last 90 days, and export. Look for step changes rather than noise.
2. Line it up with your own metrics. Put the competitor trend next to your CPC, impression share lost to rank and impression share lost to budget. Our guide to search impression share covers what each of those means.
3. Drill into keywords that carry spend. A campaign-level shift can hide inside 2 or 3 keywords. Keyword-level reports show which terms a competitor is actually targeting.
4. Run it on your brand campaign. Any domain with meaningful overlap on your own name is conquesting you. That's the input to the decision in brand bidding: should you pay for your own name?
5. Segment by device. Competitors often run different bid adjustments or budgets on mobile. A rival who barely appears on desktop can dominate phones.
6. Decide on economics, not position. If a competitor is outbidding you on a term that converts poorly for you, the right response may be to let them have it and move budget elsewhere.

One response to avoid: an automatic bid increase every time a competitor's overlap rate climbs. That's a bidding war where the only guaranteed winner is the auction. If you're on Smart Bidding, Google already sets a bid for each individual auction (it calls this auction-time bidding), so your job is to check whether your targets still make sense, not to fight the algorithm by hand.

What auction insights can't tell you

It's the big board in the war room: it shows who's on the map, not what they're planning. Some honest limits:

• No bids, budgets, keywords or copy. You see how often domains appear and where, never why.
• It's your auctions only. A competitor with 12% impression share in your report might be huge elsewhere. You're seeing the overlap, not the company.
• Thresholds hide small players. Low-activity items and anything under 10% impression share on your side produce no report, which is common for niche B2B ad groups.
• Search partners are excluded. If a meaningful share of your spend runs on partners, the report describes only part of your traffic.
• Domains aren't companies. Resellers, affiliates and review sites show up as separate rows. Google also notes "google.com" can appear when advertisers use Google-hosted domains or Google Business Profile.
• Performance Max is coarse. You get account and campaign level, split by Search and Shopping. You can't see which asset group or search theme met which competitor.

A monthly auction insights routine

Put this on the calendar for the first week of each month. It takes about 30 minutes once the export is set up.

• Export weekly auction insights for your top spend campaigns and your brand campaign.
• Flag any competitor whose overlap rate moved more than 10 points, or any new domain above 10% overlap.
• Compare against your CPC, impression share lost to rank and conversion rate for the same weeks.
• Check your change history before blaming the market.
• Write one sentence per campaign: "Nothing changed," "Competitor X got aggressive on Y," or "We lost share to budget." Decide on bids or budget only after that sentence exists.

Auction insights pairs well with the rest of a regular account review. It's one of the checks in our Google Ads audit checklist, and the competitive context it gives you feeds directly into the channel decisions in the B2B PPC playbook.

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