Define the new statistics from the Auction Insights report

Google recently announced a new report called Auction insights, which provides five different statistics at the keyword level for advertisers to get an edge over thei competition: Impression share, Average position, Overlap rate, Position above rate and Top of page rate.

Below is a sample of what the Auction insights report looks like:

• Impression share is defined as the percentage of impressions your ad received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. An ad is eligible to been seen based on your ad’s targeting settings, approval statuses, bids and Quality Scores. The Auction insights report also tells you the impression share of other advertisers as a proportion of the auctions in which you were also competing.

• In the Auction insights report, Average position is how high your ads rank compared to other advertisers competing in the same auctions. Average position is the average rank of the ad in the actions, which determines the order of the ads on the search engine results page.

• The Overlap rate tells you how often you and a competing advertiser received impressions at the same time for the keyword.

• The Position above rate tells you how frequently another advertiser’s ad was shown in a higher position that your ad in auctions where both ads received impressions.

• The Top of page rate gauges how often your ad was shown at the top of the page in the paid search results.

Please note that the Auction insights report is only available for one keyword at a time and only for keywords that meet a minimum threshold of activity for the time period specified. Also note that the Auction insights report will only provide information for a competitor that was in the same keyword auctions as you and does not specify what the competitors’ keywords, match types or targeting options were. Similarly, your keywords, quality scores or campaign settings will not be available to other advertisers.