Google Ads Auction Insights reveal competitor moves by showing who enters your auctions and how often they outrank you. You get names and numbers instead of guesses, so you can see which advertisers keep appearing beside your ads.
Most advertisers open the report, glance at impression share, then close it again. That habit wastes the one place where Google hands you real data about the businesses bidding against you.
This guide covers where the report sits and what each of the six metrics measures. You’ll also see how outranking share and position above rate compare you against one rival, and which changes to make next.
What Is the Auction Insights Report in Google Ads?
The Auction Insights report in Google Ads is a free report showing which advertisers compete in your Google Ads auctions. It sits beside your existing campaign data, so it costs nothing extra and refreshes while your ads run.
Three questions sort the useful part from the noise: where it lives, what it measures, and who it names.
1. Where Do You Find Auction Insights in Your Search Campaigns?
You’ll find it inside any campaign, ad group or keyword view in your Google Ads account. Tick the rows you want to study, then choose Auction Insights from the menu above the statistics table.
From there, set a date range that covers a full buying cycle rather than one quiet week. Short windows make small gaps look huge, and they hide the rivals who bid in bursts.
We check client accounts fortnightly, because a competitor can enter an auction and shift it inside a fortnight (monthly checks miss the quick movers who bid hard). Set a reminder if you’d rather not rely on memory.
2. What Does the Auction Insights Data Show, and What Does It Leave Out?
Google shares six metrics for each competitor it lists, and nothing beyond them. You won’t see their budget, their bids, their keywords or their conversion numbers.
So the report tells you that a rival outranked you, never why they managed it. Each advertiser impression share figure covers only the auctions you both entered, so it reads as relative rather than a market-wide share.
If you’ve ever wanted a rival’s cost per click, this isn’t the report that gives it to you. Treat the numbers as a picture of direct competition (market share lives in a different data set entirely).
3. Which Competitors Does Google Name in Its Auction Insights Reports?
Only the advertisers who cleared a minimum activity threshold in your auctions get a row in the table. Anyone bidding below that line is left out, however familiar their ads look to you.
That means a local tradie running one ad group on a tight budget may never appear, even though you’ve seen their ads on the same search. It takes a run of shared auctions before a name shows up at all.
You’ve probably spotted a rival with your own eyes and wondered why they’re missing here. Remember that absence means low volume, not absence from the market.
Breaking Down the Metrics in Google Ads Auction Insights
Most advertisers glance at impression share and ignore the five other auction insights metrics doing the real work. Each one answers a different question about where your ad lands, not just whether it showed.
Read the table below as six separate questions about your visibility.
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Impression share | The percentage of eligible auctions where your ad received an impression |
| Overlap rate | How often another advertiser’s ad was shown in the same auctions as yours |
| Outranking share | How often your ad ranked higher than a specific competitor’s, or showed when theirs did not |
| Position above rate | How often a competitor’s ad appeared above yours when both were shown |
| Top of page rate | How often your ad appeared anywhere above the organic search results |
| Absolute top of page rate | How often your ad took the very first position on the page |
Taken together, these key metrics separate showing up from winning, since you can appear in nearly every auction and still sit below a rival. Impression share runs down the column for every row, so competitor impression share sits right beside your own.
That side-by-side view is where top-of-page rate and absolute top of page rate become particularly useful. It carries extra weight on mobile, where fewer ads fit on the first screen.
Outranking Share and Position Above Rate: Your Head-to-Head Scorecard
With those six questions settled, these two numbers show exactly how often you beat a specific competitor inside the same auctions. Both compare you with one advertiser at a time, which beats any account-wide average.
Take each on its own, then read them together:
- Reading Outranking Share: A high figure means your ad ranked above theirs, or showed when theirs didn’t. Low numbers point to bids sitting under the competing bid, or a quality score that weak ad relevance drags down. Ultimately, improving relevance lifts your rank without raising your cost.
- Reading Position Above Rate: Watch this one when a rival keeps sitting above you on the page. It climbs when their ad rank beats yours in the auctions where you both showed, often because their ad relevance or landing page experience scores better.
- Using Both Together: When overlap is high but outranking share is low, you are consistently appearing in the same auctions and losing them, so bidding strategy is where you need to focus. Low overlap with strong outranking share means you rarely compete head-to-head, and the gap sits in your keyword strategy.
Those readings pull a paid search strategy in different directions, so name the one you’re looking at before you change anything. Pick the rival with the highest overlap rate, then track both numbers weekly. Movement in that auction data tells you whether your last change worked.
Competitor PPC Analysis Means Nothing Until You Act on It
Spotting a pattern in the report means little until you change your bids, budget, or ad copy. The Google Ads Auction Insights report earns its keep in the hour after you read it, not while you read it.
So start with the rival whose overlap rate sits highest, because that’s the business taking impressions you were eligible to win. If your impression share is low against them, raise bids on the high-value keywords first.
Then, check which of your bidding strategies that campaign runs before you touch a number. As a Target ROAS campaign has no manual bid to adjust, that means you move the target or the budget instead.
Beyond bidding, weak ad copy shows up as a slow drift downward even when your budget holds steady. In that case, rewrite your headline against what that competitor promises, then make sure your landing pages match the offer.
Switch to Google Shopping, and you’ll see a different set of competing ads. Google Ads reports keep search and shopping campaigns apart, so pull each one separately before you shift money between them.
In our own account work, we pull the auction insight report before any bid change and again a fortnight later. We end up with a before-and-after we can point at.
Put Your Auction Insights to Work This Week
Your competitors leave a trail in every auction you both enter, and the report hands it to you free. Reading it well means knowing which metric answers which question.
Open your account this week, choose one competitor, and write down their overlap rate and your outranking share. First, change one thing, then check the same two numbers next week.
KC Freedom manages Google Ads campaigns for businesses that want every dollar of budget working harder. Contact the team to walk through your Auction Insights Report and plan the bid changes that follow.