What Are Competitive Metrics in Google Ads?

Targeting the correct audience with your ads while keeping your position against the competition is a challenging task. Luckily, there are tools that can help you keep track, and competitive metrics can improve your chances.

What are Competitive Metrics?

Competitive metrics use data from your campaigns and measure them against your competitors. They help you gain insight into your competitive edge, see how businesses perform for the same keywords, and change your approach based on this.

Why are Competitive Metrics Important?

It is essential to analyse your own campaigns, but you may see fluctuations in your performance despite no changes to your approach. Although your approach hasn’t changed, that doesn’t mean that your competition isn’t adjusting their own campaigns which will ultimately affect your performance.

Competitive metrics provide you with an opportunity to use your competitor’s data to your own advantage.

Which Competitive Metrics are Available?

Search/Display Impression Share

Impression share is the percentage of impressions your campaigns, ads, or keywords receive and the estimated total number of impressions you were eligible for. You can see the percentage of successful targets here, although estimates are based on factors including targeting settings.

Search Exact Match IS

This shows the impressions received by estimated impressions eligible to receive for the exact search terms and closest variants. This option is not available on Shopping or the Display Network.

Search/Display Lost IS (based on budget)

This shows the percentage of time ads could not run due to budgetary restrictions. This metric works at the campaign level. If you find that the percentage is frequently high, it may be worth increasing your budget.

Search/Display Lost IS (based on rank)

Similarly to the above, this displays the percentage of time that ads were unable to run. However, this is due to a low rank in the auction. In an ideal situation, this percentage will be low. If it does increase, you should prioritise adjustments to your campaign, which can help increase rank.

The key factors for ad ranking include ad copy that is highly relevant to your target groups and the landing page to which your ad links.

Search Outranking Share

This shows you the specific competitors that are outranking your ads and how often this happens, and you can use this at all levels. This can help you identify new competition as it appears.

Search Overlap Rate

This shows you how often a website appears alongside you in search results and gives you more understanding of what your customers see when they search for you.

Position Above Rate

Similarly to the above, this shows other websites that appear alongside you in search results, however, this focuses on the results that appear above you in these searches. This could be critical when planning to outperform your competition.

When preparing for direct competition, these metrics can be the difference between getting sales and losing out to your competitors.

You can find more information on different types of ads and campaigns, as well as more in-depth strategies, tools, and issues in the PPC section of our blog.

If you would like any help with your PPC campaigns, get in touch with SilverDisc.