Now Analyze your Competition in Google AdWords

Post date: Jun 12, 2010 5:33:26 AM

Google has introduced a new "Analyze Competition" feature for AdWords advertisers. It can be found in the "opportunities" tab.

The feature examines the account's activity over two weeks, and lists categories that represent the products/services you're advertising. These are based on search terms and are matched up against your keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with the account, users will see a bar graph highlighting individual performance compared to the performance of other advertisers in the category. Also, the data in ‘Analyze competition’ is anonymous to protect advertisers privacy and an advertiser can never come to know who is bidding with him in real time auction. So this helps to know your competition in brief. I find this similar to benchmarking feature in Google Analytics.

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.

The feature is only available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface for now, but Google says it will expand availability in the near future.


More information about the feature can be found here.