How To Track Your AdWords Competitors Over Time Using Auction Insights

Former Googler Daniel Gilbert shows you how to turn the static AdWords Auction Insights data into a report that tracks your closest competitors over time.

It’s good to know what the competition is doing. While you control your bids, it’s your competitors who determine what you actually need to pay and where your ad will be positioned.

There are third-party tools that provide some competitor information, but their data on average position, impression share, outranking share, etc., will never be as accurate as the actual AdWords data that you can get from the Auction Insights report. The only issue with this report is that it isn't easy to see changes over time, which is what you want to do if, say, you’re trying to understand changes in cost-per-click (CPC) or average position.

Irritatingly, the Auction Insights report isn't available in AdWords Scripts (or even in the API) — if you want to do anything with it, you have to download it from AdWords manually. However, that doesn't mean you have to do everything manually! At Brainlabs (my employer), we use a simple Google Apps Script that we've shared below to turn the data into a readable format and add graphs like the ones featured below.

Google Apps Scripts are quite similar to AdWords Scripts. They allow you to automate things like creating sheets, charts and formatting. Our script below will pick out your top five competitors based on their highest impression share and show you how their presence has varied over time (once you’ve followed the steps below).

Note: Auction Insights are available for Search and Shopping campaigns, although Shopping campaigns get fewer columns. This script should work for either.

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