Google Ads competitor analysis starts inside your own account. The auction insights report shows exactly who you compete against in the auction, how often you overlap, and who wins more often. Everything you can learn from third party tools is secondary to that, because auction insights is the only source that reflects your actual auctions.
It also has a hard limit worth knowing before you go looking for it. Google states that “the auction insights report doesn’t show insights when impression share is less than 10%”.
So if you are a small advertiser in a big market, the report may simply be empty. That is not a bug, and it is itself useful information.
What does the auction insights report show?
Google publishes six metrics for Search campaigns and three for Shopping.
| Metric | What it tells you | Available for |
|---|---|---|
| Impression share | What share of eligible auctions you appeared in | Search, Shopping, Performance Max |
| Overlap rate | How often another advertiser showed when you did | Search, Shopping, Performance Max |
| Outranking share | How often you ranked above them, or showed when they did not | Search, Shopping, Performance Max |
| Position above rate | How often they appeared above you when you both showed | Search |
| Top of page rate | How often the ad appeared above organic results | Search |
| Absolute top of page rate | How often it was the very first ad | Search |
Performance Max reports auction insights split by channel, with Search and Shopping shown separately. Keywords, ad groups and campaigns also have to meet a minimum activity threshold before anything appears.
What this means for you: overlap rate tells you who you actually compete with, and outranking share tells you whether you are winning. Those two together are the whole report in practice.
How do you read the report without over reacting?
Read it at the keyword level, not just the campaign level, and read it over a long enough window that one week of activity does not distort it.
At campaign level, auction insights blends every keyword together and gives you an average that describes nobody. The interesting picture is on your five most important keywords, where a single competitor may dominate one term and be absent from another.
Three patterns and what they usually mean:
- High overlap, low outranking share. Someone is consistently beating you on the same searches. Either they bid more or their Ad Rank is better. Relevance is the cheaper of the two to fix.
- Low overlap, high outranking share. You rarely meet, but you win when you do. You are probably competing in a niche they touch only occasionally.
- A new name appearing. Someone entered the market. Expect costs to move. This is often the explanation for a sudden performance change nobody made.
The mistake to avoid is treating a low impression share as automatically bad. Impression share is a measure of how much of the available market you took, not how well you did with it. A 20% impression share at a profitable cost per lead beats 80% at a loss.
What can you learn from competitors’ ads?
Mostly positioning, and it is worth an hour every quarter. Google’s own Ads Transparency Center lets you see ads an advertiser is currently running, which is a more reliable source than third party scrapes.
Look for four things:
- What they lead with. Price, speed, guarantee, credentials. If all five competitors lead with price and none lead with speed, that gap may be yours.
- What assets they use. If their ad occupies four lines and yours occupies two, you are losing screen space for free. Our post on Google Ads assets covers fixing that.
- Where they send traffic. A dedicated landing page versus the home page tells you how seriously they take the channel.
- What they promise. Then check whether their landing page delivers it. If it does not, that is an opening.
Copying a competitor’s ad is the wrong lesson. You do not know whether it works. Their ad has been running for months, which tells you they have not turned it off, and nothing more.
Should you bid on competitor brand names?
It is allowed, it works in some markets, and it is expensive. Bidding on a competitor’s name is legal in most countries, though using their trademark in your ad text usually is not.
What to expect: a low Quality Score, because your ad is not very relevant to someone searching a brand name, and therefore a high cost per click. You are buying your way into a search where the person has already decided on someone else.
It tends to be worth it when the purchase is considered rather than impulsive, when switching is realistic, and when you have a clear point of difference to lead with. It tends to fail when the searcher is looking for a specific product only your competitor sells.
Expect retaliation. The usual outcome of competitor bidding in a small market is that everyone ends up paying more for their own brand terms. Consider whether that is a fight worth starting.
What about tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs?
They are useful for discovery and unreliable for numbers. They estimate competitor spend, keywords and ad copy from sampled data. The estimates are directionally interesting and frequently wrong in magnitude.
Use them for what they are good at:
- Finding advertisers you did not know were in the market.
- Seeing the general shape of someone’s keyword coverage.
- Spotting a competitor entering or leaving a category.
Do not use a third party estimate of competitor spend in a board deck as if it were a fact. Auction insights is your real data. A tool is a hint.
What do you do with what you find?
Usually not bid more. That is the reflex and it is rarely the best answer, because Ad Rank is not just about the bid.
Better responses, in order of what tends to pay off:
- Improve relevance. Quality Score is built from expected click through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience on a 1 to 10 scale, as Google documents. Improving it lowers what you pay for the same position. See our post on Quality Score.
- Improve the landing page. Winning the click and losing the visitor is worse than not competing.
- Pick different ground. If a competitor dominates one keyword, find the searches they are ignoring.
- Take the space. More assets, better sitelinks, a larger ad. Cheaper than outbidding.
- Accept a lower impression share. Profitable and smaller beats large and unprofitable.
Common questions
Why is my auction insights report empty?
Most likely your impression share is under 10%, which is the threshold below which Google does not display the report. It may also be that the campaign has not met the minimum activity threshold for the period selected.
Does auction insights show how much competitors spend?
No. It shows relative visibility and rank, never budget or cost. Anyone claiming to know a competitor’s exact Google Ads spend is estimating.
Can competitors see my data?
They see the same shape of report about you that you see about them. Nobody sees anyone’s costs, conversions or budgets.
How often should I check it?
Monthly is plenty for most accounts, or whenever performance changes without an obvious cause. It is one of the first places to look when costs move and nobody touched the account.
Should I worry about a competitor with a much higher impression share?
Only if you are losing the searches you most want. A competitor with 90% impression share may be bidding on everything including traffic you deliberately avoid. Compare at keyword level before drawing conclusions.
Does competitor analysis matter for Performance Max?
You get auction insights split by channel, which is better than nothing, but the control you have to act on it is limited. Our Performance Max guide covers what you can steer.
Where to go from here
Open auction insights for your top campaign, set it to the last 90 days, and segment it by your five most important keywords. If the report is empty, that tells you your impression share is under 10%, which is a more urgent finding than anything the report would have shown.
If you want help reading what it says, our Google Ads management page explains how we handle competitive work, and our post on running an audit covers the wider account review. You can get in touch if you want a second opinion on who you are really competing with.
