Google recently announced the removal of auction insights from Looker Studio, affecting the ability to perform competitive analysis. Auction insights will no longer be available in Looker Studio and several fields must be removed to avoid broken reports.

Why it matters:

The auction insights report is a great tool for advertisers to understand the competitive landscape better. With auction insights, advertisers can assess their performance against competitors participating in the auction and make strategic decisions around bidding and budgeting. By removing these insights from Looker Studio, Google is forcing advertisers to revert to the less efficient process of manually gathering competitive metrics directly from Google ads, ultimately affecting daily workflow and reporting.

The update impacts several fields, including:

• Impression Share

• Auction Insight - Domain

• Auction Insight - avg. position

• Abs. top of page rate

• Position above rate

• Outranking Share

• Overlap Rate

• Top-of-page rate

• Auction Insight - Store display name

• Shopping-specific metrics (impression share, outranking share, overlap rate)

Going forward

The change represents a shift in how to access and analyze competitive data with Google's reporting tools. From now on, you will need to manually export data from Google Ads to Google Sheets and create relevant graphs, or alternatively access auction insights directly in the Google Ads interface. The importance of understanding where a brand stands in relation to its competitors is essential for long-term success. If you are keen to take your competitive analysis to the next level, we strongly recommend utilizing the metric Share of Search as an additional layer, which will help you better understand the impact of your marketing efforts by grasping consumer preferences and immediate demand. Learn more in the full article here