How to estimate a competitor’s Google Ads budget
You cannot see a competitor’s Google Ads budget. Google does not publish any advertiser’s spend, bids, keywords or cost per click, and no tool outside Google can read them either. What you can do is estimate it from four sources: the auction insights report inside your own account, some impression share arithmetic, the Ads Transparency Center, and third-party estimators. Combined, they give you a range and a direction, which is enough to make budget decisions. Treated as a single number, they will mislead you.
Can you see how much a competitor is spending on Google Ads?
No. Every figure you will find about a competitor’s Google Ads spend is an estimate, including the ones inside Google Ads itself. Google’s auction insights report shows how often you and another advertiser appeared in the same auctions and who ranked higher, not what either of you paid. The Ads Transparency Center shows which ads an advertiser has run, not what they cost.
That does not make the exercise pointless. Knowing that a competitor appears in most of the auctions you enter, outranks you in half of them and has been running the same ads for a year tells you a great deal about their commitment and roughly how their budget compares with yours. It just needs to be read as a comparison, not a bank statement.
How to check competitor activity with auction insights
The auction insights report is the only competitor data that comes from Google’s own auction records, so start there. Google describes it as a way to compare your performance with other advertisers who are participating in the same auctions, and it is available for Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. Open it from the Campaigns, Ad groups or Keywords table, select the rows you want to compare, and choose Auction insights.
For Search campaigns the report gives six statistics for each competing domain, as Google defines them:
- Impression share: the impressions you received divided by the estimated impressions you were eligible to receive.
- Overlap rate: how often another advertiser’s ad received an impression when yours also did.
- Outranking share: how often your ad ranked higher than theirs, or showed when theirs did not.
- Position above rate: how often the other advertiser’s ad showed in a higher position than yours.
- Top of page rate: how often an ad showed above the organic results.
- Absolute top of page rate: how often an ad showed as the very first ad on the page.
Shopping campaigns get three of these: impression share, overlap rate and outranking share.
Read the report in this order. Overlap rate tells you who your real competitors are: a domain that overlaps with you on most auctions is bidding on the same keywords in the same locations. Position above rate and outranking share tell you who is winning. Top of page and absolute top of page rates tell you who is paying for prominence. A competitor with high overlap, high position above rate and high absolute top rate is spending seriously on your terms. One with high overlap and a low position above rate is present but not pushing hard.
How to estimate a competitor’s budget from impression share
Impression share is the closest thing you have to a spend estimate, because it is the one metric where you know your own side of the equation. Google defines impression share as your impressions divided by the total eligible impressions in the auctions you were competitive in.
The maths runs like this. Your impressions divided by your impression share gives the estimated size of the auction pool you share. A competitor’s impression share multiplied by that pool gives their estimated impressions. If their cost per impression is in the same range as yours, their spend on those auctions is roughly your spend multiplied by the ratio of their impression share to yours.
That last step carries the assumption that matters. A competitor with a higher position above rate is probably paying more per click than you, and one that only shows lower on the page is probably paying less, so adjust the estimate in that direction. Run it per campaign, not across the account, because the pool differs for every keyword set and location. And remember the report only covers the auctions you entered: a competitor spending heavily on keywords you do not bid on is invisible here.
Use the result to answer one question: is this competitor spending a fraction of what we spend, about the same, or several times more? That answer is reliable. The dollar figure behind it is not.
What the Ads Transparency Center and ad libraries show
The Ads Transparency Center is Google’s public ad library. Google’s advertising policies describe it as showing the advertiser name, location, the entity that pays for the ads, and the ads they have served over a period across Google Search and YouTube. Search for a competitor’s business name and you can see the ads they are running, the formats they use and how long particular ads have been in circulation.
It shows nothing about spend, targeting or performance. A competitor running a large number of ads across Search and YouTube, refreshed regularly, is investing in the channel. One with two old Search ads and nothing else is not. Seasonal patterns show too: ads that appear each June and disappear each August tell you when their budget arrives.
Meta’s Ad Library does the same job for Facebook and Instagram, which is worth checking because a competitor’s spend rarely sits on one platform. Treat both libraries as evidence of activity and messaging, never as a spend figure.
Third-party estimators and what they can and cannot tell you
Several categories of tool will give you a competitor’s estimated monthly Google Ads spend.
- Paid search intelligence platforms sample search results for large keyword lists, record which advertisers appear, and multiply an estimated click volume by an estimated cost per click. The output is a modelled number built on two estimates.
- SEO suites with a paid search module work the same way, using their own keyword databases, and are usually weaker on smaller local markets such as Perth where their sampling is thin.
- Search results monitoring tools run your keywords on a schedule from set locations and log the ads that appear. They estimate nothing, which is their strength: you see what is showing, when, and to whom.
These tools are useful for keyword overlap, ad copy benchmarking and spotting new entrants. For spend, use them as a third opinion beside the auction insights ratio and the Transparency Center, and expect the three to disagree.
What are the limitations of auction insights and how can you supplement it?
Auction insights has six limitations you need to work around.
- It only shows advertisers in your auctions. A competitor bidding on terms, locations or hours you do not cover never appears.
- It needs a minimum level of activity. Google states the report requires a minimum threshold of activity for the period selected, and that it does not show insights when impression share is below 10%. New campaigns and low-volume keywords return nothing.
- It hides everything that matters for spend. Keywords, bids, budgets, quality and cost per click are all absent.
- It does not segment by match type. A broad match keyword can pull unrelated advertisers into your report, so check unfamiliar domains before treating them as competitors.
- Search partner traffic is excluded, so the picture is Google Search only.
- It reports outcomes, not causes. A competitor outranking you may have a better landing page, a better offer or a bigger bid, and the report cannot say which.
Supplement it with the sources above and with your own account. Segment the report by device and by time to find where a competitor is weak. Check the search terms report to see which queries the overlap is happening on. Run your core keywords manually from your targeted locations during your scheduled hours (PWD runs non-brand campaigns weekdays 6am to 6pm Perth time and brand campaigns around the clock, so that is when we look). And put your own conversion data next to all of it, because outranking a competitor on a keyword that does not convert is not a win.
How to analyse competitor ads without overreacting
The most expensive mistake in competitor analysis is a bidding war. Raising bids every time a competitor’s position above rate climbs hands Google more money and hands you nothing. Position one is not always profitable, and a competitor who wants it at any price can have it.
Instead, check three things when a competitor gains ground. Whether your ad quality has slipped, which our guide to improving a keyword’s Quality Score covers. Whether they are winning on your brand terms, which is worth defending and is covered in our article on bidding on competitors’ brand terms. And whether your budget is sized for the market you are in, which is a question for our guide to how much to spend on Google Ads. A wider view of the competitor’s marketing sits in our guide to running a competitor analysis.
When to hand this to an agency
Do it yourself if you run one or two Search campaigns, have time to check auction insights monthly and can live with a rough estimate.
Hand it to an agency when the competitive picture is driving budget decisions worth more than a few hundred dollars a month, when you are entering a market and need to know what it will cost to be visible, or when auction insights keeps returning nothing because your campaigns are too small to clear the threshold. An agency with search intelligence tools and other accounts in your market can triangulate faster.
PWD manages Google Ads for Perth and WA businesses from West Leederville, and the account sits in your name so the auction insights history stays with you.
Get a free Google Ads account audit
If you want to know where you stand against the competitors in your auctions, send us your account. We review auction insights, impression share, search terms and conversion tracking and tell you in writing what is worth changing. No obligation and no lock-in contract.
Request a free Google Ads account audit or call 08 6146 0195.
