Most home improvement business owners assume their Google Ads performance is a closed book. You can see your own leads, your own spend, your own results. What you cannot see, or so you would think, is what the shutter or loft conversion company three miles away is doing on the same search terms. That is not true. Google Ads has a free report built for exactly this, and most people never open it.
What the Auction Insights Report Actually Shows You
It sits inside your account under Insights and Reports. It will show you how often you show up on your keywords compared to the businesses bidding on those same keywords. It works at account, campaign, or keyword level.
The Numbers Worth Actually Looking At
There are more metrics in this report than most business owners need. These are the ones that matter:
Impression share - this tells you how often you are even in the running. If you are only showing up in 30% of the auctions you are eligible for, something is limiting you, either budget or ad quality.
Overlap rate - tells you who you are genuinely up against for the same customer. A competitor with a high overlap rate is fighting you for the exact same searches, over and over.
Outranking share - tells you how often you beat that competitor when you are both showing. This is the clearest read on who is actually winning.
The top of page rate - tells you who is landing the best position on the results page. If a competitor consistently beats you here, that is worth a closer look.
The Part Most Businesses Miss
Once you know who your real auction competitors are, you can look them up in the Google Ads Transparency Center, a free public tool. It shows you the actual ad copy they are running right now.
This is not about copying anyone. It is about seeing what they are leading with. Are they running a guarantee while you are not? Are they quoting a faster installation time? A different offer entirely? Sometimes the reason a competitor is winning has nothing to do with budget and everything to do with a stronger ad.
Where This Goes Wrong
Checking this report once and reacting to a single number is the most common mistake. A competitor with a high overlap rate is not automatically a threat if their outranking share against you is low. Before changing bids or rewriting ads, work out whether the issue is budget, ad quality, or something else entirely. The report will not tell you which one directly, but the Search Lost IS columns at campaign level will.
Why We Check This Every Month
This is exactly the kind of account-level check that should happen regularly, not once and forgotten. New competitors enter auctions. Existing ones scale up or pull back. Regular reviews keep you ahead of shifts before they cost you leads.
If you want a clearer picture of who you are really up against on Google Ads and want to know whether your account is set up to win those auctions, book a call.
We cover all this and more in our Google Ad audits or when we take over full management from another agency. [Get in touch here.]
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