Auction Insights explained: reading competitor pressure

The percentage of auctions you entered that you actually appeared in. Low impression share has two causes and Google tells you which: lost to budget (you ran out of money) or lost to rank (your Ad Rank wasn't high enough). The fixes are completely different — one is a budget conversation, the other is a bid, Quality Score or relevance conversation.

How often a competitor appeared in the same auction as you. High overlap means you're genuinely competing for the same customer. A competitor with 80% overlap is your real rival; one with 8% is mostly bidding on different terms and can usually be ignored.

Outranking share is how often you ranked higher than them (or showed when they didn't). Position above rate is the mirror. If a competitor's position above rate against you has been climbing week after week, they've either raised bids or improved relevance — and your cost per click is about to follow.

On mobile, positions below the first ad get a fraction of the clicks. Absolute top-of-page rate is often the single metric that best explains a sudden drop in click-through rate with no change in ranking position.

Tracking these daily rather than monthly is what turns Auction Insights from a report into an alert: you find out that a competitor entered your market in three days, not at the end of the quarter.