Monitor Your Market & Compare Your Performace With Your Competitors
Google Ads play a crucial part in the marketing of many dealers and OEMs. It can be an effective channel to get traffic, generate leads and attract new customers.
Google Ads campaigns are billed on a cost-per-click basis. How much an individual click costs on Google is determined by how competitive the auction is (i.e. how many other advertisers are targeting the same term or keywords).
It is always helpful to keep an eye on who is competing: new entrants or increased budgets from current advertisers can drive up the cost per click, which in turn can drive up the cost per lead.
Auction Insights
In the Google platform, you can find who the competition is in your ‘Auction insights’ report.
To find auction insights
Log into Google ads
– Click on ‘Keywords’ on the light grey nav on the left
– Click on ‘Auction insights’ in the drop-down
The Auction insights report can be viewed on an account level or campaign level.
Competitor report dashboard
Another way to see your google ads competitors is to set up a dashboard in Looker Studio. These insights can then be emailed directly to your inbox each month.
Below is an example of the competitor dashboard:
How to read this report:
Impression share is the percentage of potential searches a brand appears on the keywords they are targeting. When looking at a competitor, it is the percentage of potential searches the competing brand appeared on that we are also targeting.
Overlap rate is the percent of times X brand appears on those keywords at the same time as our brand.
Abs top of page rate is how often a brand or ad appears in position 1.
Example: If competitor A has a 16% impression share, it means they appeared on 16% of the same searches we are targeting. If their overlap rate is 23%, it means of that 16% of the time their ad appeared (impression share), 23% of the time our ad was also live. If they have a 28% absolute top-of-page rate, they are in position 1 28% of the time they appear.
This allows an advertiser to understand how aggressive (or not) the competition is in terms of number of Keywords (impressions share) and budget or bids (abs top of page rate)
How to set up a dashboard and automated report:
Requisites:
1. You need a Gmail account.
2. Your Gmail must have access to your Google Ads account. (if you are with an agency and they do not allow access to the account, or they own the account, it may be worth considering a new agency)
Time: This will take about 2-3 minutes to complete
Experience: Novice
Set up your dashboard:
Sign into your Google / Gmail account with access to your Google ads account.
Get your google ads competitors report here https://datastudio.google.com/s/kUyj2ZNyZwk
In the top right corner of the report:
– Click the 3 dots
– And then click make a copy
When the pop-up opens, click ‘Google Ads’ under new data sources.
Then click ‘Create data source’
And select ‘Google Ads’
Authorise the connection and select your account
And then press ‘Connect’ in the top right corner
On the next screen click ‘add to report ‘ in the top right corner.
Then click ‘Copy report’
🎉 Congratulations. You now have a Google ads Competitor dashboard! 🎉
How to use the dashboard:
You can filter the dashboard by campaign and change the month.
Campaign filter:
Select the campaign of interest from the drop-down menu and only see the competitor for that Google Ads campaign only. This can be helpful, for example, if you have a brand campaign you to see who is bidding on your brand terms.
Date filter:
This can help understand the market. It can help you see changes in the market by comparing data month on month. Use this to identify new entrants/advertisers or changes to a competitor’s budget (changes to search impression share or absolute top can indicate a change in budget and or bidding strategy)
How to automate your competitor report
In the top right corner:
– Click share &
– Schedule email delivery
Add all the email addresses of:
1. Who you would like to send this to
2. Change the start time to the 1st of the month
3. Change the repeat to “Custom” and Every month on the 1st day
4. Click “Schedule”
Google Ads is a very effective channel for acquiring new customers, and Looker Studio is a very powerful tool for helping visualise data to identify trends, issues and opportunities.
If you would like help with either Google ads management or custom dashboards please send us an email at hello@retainmedia.com.au or complete the form below.
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