Google’s newest Adwords features are a welcome addition providing us with more competitive data and transparency at a keyword level.
Auction Insights Reports
In a move to “empower advertisers to make better informed optimization decisions”, Google rolled out the Auctions Insights tool this week. The new tool will help online marketers compare the performance of their ad compared to others in the same keyword auction.
Granted, some of the new information is no more detailed than you would find if you performed a standard search, but having the data in one place will certainly make a difference to endless refreshing of search pages, use of the adpreview tool.
The Auction Insights Tool can be found under a new Tab ‘Keyword Details’ in the Adwords interface. However, not all keywords are eligible, and you can only access this report if you have the little icon next to your keyword as shown in the image below.
What new data can we expect?
Some of the data we already have, but the Insights Tool provides the following 5 stats:
? Average position – Avg Ad rank compared to other domains
? Impression share – % of impressions the Ads will get
? Position above rate – How often you’re above your competitor Ads
? Top of page percent – % of time your Ad shows in the top block
? Overlap rate – How often Ads overlap with competitor Ads
You can only select one keyword at a time and using the example above, this is what the tool brings up for competitors on the term ‘hotels cotswolds’
The new reports won’t give competitor keyword settings or quality score details, but it should help marketers to make smarter decisions,
Quality Score Transparency
The on-going mystery of the Quality Score has just been made a little easier to understand. This feature has been around since early April, but with the constant notifications of late, this could have passed you by.
The new Quality Score information has been added to the status hover for any given keyword and provides additional information compared to other advertisers. I have linked to the Google Adwords help pages where you can find a more detailed breakdown of what the new information means for advertisers. The new keyword status notifications include:
? Expected CTR – how likely it is that your ads will get clicked when shown for that keyword
? Ad Relevance – how closely related your keyword is to your ads
? Landing Page Experience -how helpful your website’s landing page is to people who click your ad.
There is still not as much info as we would like with regards to step by step instructions on how to make sure our Quality Score is 10/10 for every keyword combination in our campaigns, but this should help focus efforts to improve performance.
Stay tuned for a follow up post!
