Auction Insights shows which other advertisers appear in the same searches as you, and how often they beat you. For nonprofits the surprise is usually who is in the list: not the other charities you think of as peers, but commercial businesses bidding on the same words for entirely different reasons.
Finding it
Google Ads → Campaigns (or Ad groups, or Keywords) → select the rows you want → the Auction insights option in the toolbar. It works at account, campaign, ad group and keyword level, and the keyword level is where it gets genuinely useful.
Set the date range to at least 30 days. Shorter windows produce noise.
The columns, in plain language
| Column | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Impression share | How often that advertiser appeared, out of the auctions they were eligible for |
| Overlap rate | How often they showed up when you did — how directly you compete |
| Position above rate | When you both showed, how often they ranked higher |
| Top of page rate | How often they appeared above the organic results |
| Outranking share | How often you beat them, or showed when they did not |
The two that decide what you do are overlap rate and position above rate. High overlap plus high position above means somebody is consistently taking the searches you want.
Auction Insights does not show cost, budget or performance. A competitor with 90% impression share might be spending enormously for very little. Do not infer that they are winning at anything except being visible.
What nonprofits usually find
Three patterns come up repeatedly, and each means something different.
Commercial advertisers on your mission terms. A cancer charity finds private clinics. A debt advice service finds commercial debt consolidation firms. A rescue charity finds pet insurance. These advertisers have real budgets and a $2.00 manual bid cap cannot compete with them. This finding alone is often the argument for Smart Bidding.
Aggregators and directories. Sites that exist to collect your traffic and route it onward. They bid broadly and rank on volume. You will rarely outrank them everywhere, and you do not need to — you need to win the specific, high-intent terms.
Other charities in your sector. Usually less threatening than expected. Most are on the same grant with the same cap, and the account with the better structure wins.
Turning it into decisions
- Run it on your five most important keywords individually, not just at account level. Account-level auction insights blend everything into an average that hides the terms you care about.
- Where position above rate is high against a commercial advertiser, the honest read is that you are outgunned on bid. Lift the cap with Smart Bidding, or move to longer-tail terms where they are not bidding.
- Where you outrank everyone comfortably, stop optimising that term. It is done. Spend the attention elsewhere.
- Where an unexpected name appears, go and look at their ad and their landing page. Competitor research is a legitimate use of ten minutes, and their ad copy tells you what message is working in your space.
The strategic use
The most valuable thing Auction Insights does for a nonprofit is settle an internal argument. Boards and directors often assume a charity's own brand and cause words are uncontested. The report shows, concretely, that eleven commercial advertisers appear on the term you thought you owned.
That reframes the conversation from "why is our grant not spending" to "we are competing for attention with businesses whose budgets are not capped", which is both true and much more useful. It is also the clearest evidence for when a small paid budget alongside the grant is worth considering.
What not to do with it
Do not chase outranking share as a goal. Beating a competitor on a term that does not convert is expenditure of effort, not progress. Read Auction Insights next to impression share and your conversion data, and let those decide which battles are worth having.