How To Check Who Is Bidding Against You in Google Ads

Last Updated on: 28th October 2024, 11:28 am

Are those pesky competitors bidding against you in Google Ads? Don’t worry, there is something you can do to spy on them and get a competitive edge.

This question was recently asked by one of our Google Ads Consulting clients: “How can I find out who’s bidding against me” in Google Ads, and more importantly, “How can I find out their bidding strategy ” and “how much they’re actually overlapping with what I’m doing on Google Ads?”

So here’s what you would need to do in your Google Ads campaign:

Using the Auction Insights in Google Ads

Quite simply, from the campaign screen, you need to go and look at the tab which is marked Auction Insights, which is commonly overlooked by people. And you make sure that you set the timeframe accordingly, so you could look to see who was bidding against you yesterday, for the last week, or for the last 30 days, et cetera.

You would then break it down by campaign, so you can see who was bidding against you for each of the campaigns.

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And this is super important because you can always, when doing a Google search yourself, see the people that are advertising, because it may be down to the settings that they have chosen, means that you can actually always see their ads.

So this is extremely important to be able to tell, which means you can monitor their strategy. You can also see how much they are overlapping with the keywords you’ve chosen.

The people you want to watch out for are those that have a strong overlap rate, and where you’d also want to keep an eye on their top of page rate and absolute top of page rate as well, and how much you’re outranking them, too.

How to Optimise Your Campaigns Based on the Auction Insights

• Identify strong and weak competitors – Focus on competitors consistently appearing against you. Identify the strong ones to learn from and emulate their strategies. Then, capitalise on the gaps from the weak competitors.
• Increase your impression share – Increase your bids and budget to capture more impressions for the particularly profitable keywords.
• High overlap? Create a fresh differentiation strategy to make your ads stand out from your competitors.
• Test & optimise – Constantly look for ways to increase your Google Ads’ Quality Scores, so you capture more impressions, engagement, conversions at a lower or the same CPC.

Once you understand your unique advantages and opportunities, you’ll be on your way to identifying your best bidding strategy.

Can I Stop Competitors from Bidding Against My Terms on Google Ads?

You can’t stop competitors from bidding against you on Google Ads unless they’re making false or slanderous claims. However, if your competitors are targeting your brand terms (e.g., someone targets the “Claire Jarrett Google Ads coach” keyword on Google), a good choice is running your own ads for that term.

Otherwise, in a free-for-all auction, you can’t prevent them from targeting the same keywords. Your best option is to create ads and value propositions so good that the leads won’t have any choice but to click on your ads!

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