AdWords brings you insight about the competitive landscape

As an AdWords advertiser, you know you’re not alone in the auction -- any number of advertisers may be using AdWords to offer some of the same goods and services as you. You can monitor your performance and use optimization tools to improve your ROI, but you still might not know how you’re performing as compared to similar advertisers. We’re aiming to bring more transparency to AdWords with the launch of Analyze competition in the Opportunities tab. For now, this feature is only available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface, but we'll expand this to more advertisers in the near future.

‘Analyze competition’ examines your account’s activity over the past two weeks and lists categories that represent the products or services you're advertising. Categories are based on actual Google.com search terms and are matched up against your keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with your account, you’ll see a bar graph, which shows your individual performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category.

When you hover over the data in the 'Competitive Range' column, you'll be able to see more details such as the exact size of your competitive range, the mean and median performance levels for this range, as well as data on the absolute top and bottom performers.

In the case below, you’ll see that we’ve chosen to evaluate our performance based on how our CTR compares with that of other advertisers. In addition to CTR, you’ll also be able to look at competitive data for impressions, clicks, and average position, and you can segment data by advertiser location.

(click to view full size image)

As with other areas of the Opportunities tab, you’ll be able to export information from ‘Analyze competition’ to a .csv file.

It’s important to remember that data in ‘Analyze competition’ is anonymous, and as part of our commitment to protect your privacy, we don't reveal information about any advertiser's identity.

Now that you know what ‘Analyze competition’ does, here are some tips on how to make the most of this data:

• Take action. Click the ‘Explore ideas’ button to see customized keyword, bid, and budget ideas for your account.
• Consider your advertising goals and focus on the most relevant metrics. It’s not always a bad thing to perform below competitors on a metric that’s not important to you.
• If you see that one campaign is performing poorly in comparison to the competition, you can get insight into changes you can make to improve that campaign.

Just like the other areas of the Opportunities tab, we hope that ‘Analyze competition’ will help you uncover new opportunities to improve your AdWords performance. To learn more about this feature, visit the Help Center, or watch this short video.

To read more about 'Analzye competition' and to discover other new developments in AdWords, visit the Ad Innovations page.

Posted by Emily Williams, Inside AdWords crew