Auction Insights in Looker Studio

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 Looker Studio? This is a really powerful way to automate competitor insights from within Looker Studio, allowing you to see your competitors and how well you’re performing against them.

Creating the Auctions Insight Report in Looker 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 period (remember to group 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, 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 campaign (and as 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 names 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 Looker 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.

Looker Studio Tip!

If you set up your Looker Studio report a while ago and tried 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 Looker 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 to your Google Looker Studio reports.

Want to Learn More About Looker Studio?

For more on Looker Studio, check out our Guide To Using Filters, Reference Lines & Trend Lines, and Using Comparison Metrics. If you have any questions or there’s anything else we can help with on Looker Studio, please leave a comment below, or contact us at contact@glowmetrics.com.

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