Google Ads Auction Insights: The Report That Cannot Leave Google Ads

Two of the three come from Google’s own documentation: the connector deprecation notice and the auction insights help page. The third I counted myself, in Google’s public gallery, signed out, on 19 August 2026.

What you cannot do is take it anywhere else. Google removed the auction insights fields from its Data Studio connector in September 2024, and the API metrics that would replace them are not public. I ran the query this morning on a live account and got a permission error back, verbatim. So this is the one report that cannot sit beside your own numbers, in your own tool, next to revenue from your own system. It stays in Google's interface, or it travels as a CSV that somebody remembered to export.

What the report contains

Google describes it in one sentence: the report lets you "compare your performance with other advertisers who are participating in the same auctions that you are". That covers the advertisers who showed up in the same auctions as you, in the slice of time you selected, and no one else.

For Search campaigns it gives six columns: impression share, overlap rate, position above rate, top of page rate, absolute top of page rate, and outranking share. Shopping gets three: impression share, overlap rate, outranking share. Performance Max shows auction insights segmented into Search and Shopping. For Search and Shopping you can segment by time and by device; for Performance Max Google says the report is available at the account and campaign level, which is the coarser end of what you might want.

Two thresholds decide whether you see anything at all. Google states the first plainly: "Only keywords and ad groups that meet a minimum threshold of activity will have the auction insights report." The second is sharper: the report "doesn't show insights when impression share is less than 10%". Google does not say whose impression share, and I am not going to pretend to know. Either reading has the same consequence for you: below that line the report goes quiet.

That is worth holding on to before anyone builds a strategy on this report. It is a directional read of a busy segment, and it is silent about everything quiet.

The six columns, in Google's own words

Most of the confusion around this report comes from reading the column names as if they meant the obvious thing. They do not. Here is each one exactly as Google defines it, with the part people get wrong.

Impression share is "the number of impressions you received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive." Google's paragraph does not stop there, and the next sentence is the one that matters here: "In the auction insights report, impression share also tells you the impression share of other advertisers as a proportion of the auctions in which they were eligible to show." So every row carries the same column about a different participant, and in each case the denominator is Google's estimate of that participant's eligibility, not a count of auctions that happened.

Overlap rate is "how often another advertiser's ad received an impression when your ad also received an impression." It is the only column that tells you plainly whether you and a given domain are in the same room. Read it first.

Position above rate is "how often the other advertiser's ad was shown in a higher position than yours was, when both of your ads were shown at the same time." The condition at the end does the work: this is a head to head number, counted only in the auctions where you both appeared.

Outranking share is "how often your ad ranked higher in the auction than another advertiser's ad, or if your ad showed when theirs didn't." The second half is the trap. Auctions where your competitor did not show at all count in your favour, so a high outranking share can mean you win the fights, or it can mean the other advertiser rarely turns up.

Top of page rate is "how often your ad (or the ad of another advertiser, depending on which row you're viewing) was shown at the top of the page, above the unpaid search results." The parenthesis is Google's: the number changes meaning depending on which row of the table you are reading.

Absolute top of the page rate, to use Google's own column name, is the same, narrowed to "the very first ad above the organic search results."

Sort them by what they are about. Impression share, top of page rate and absolute top of page rate describe whichever row you are reading, yours or a competitor's. Overlap rate, position above rate and outranking share describe a pair: you and that one domain. There is no column in this report that describes the market. Reading a pair number as a market number is the most common mistake in decks built from it.

One more caution about that first column, from Google: "Sometimes impression share at the campaign and product group level and impression share from auction insights reports may have slight differences. The reason for the slight discrepancy is likely that auction insights filters out auctions with very low impressions, which the campaign level doesn't." Two numbers with the same name, computed over different sets of auctions.

What it does not contain

Six columns and a domain. That is the whole report, and the domain is worth a word of its own: what you get is the display URL, which Google's own field list calls Auction Insight - Domain. Not a company, not an account, not an agency. If you want advertiser identity rather than a domain, that lives elsewhere, in the Ads Transparency Center, which is a different dataset about ads that ran rather than auctions you were in.

There is no competitor cost, no competitor budget, no quality score, no list of the keywords they bid on, and no revenue. Impression share is a share of auctions, not a share of the market, and a domain that appears above you in the overlap is not necessarily spending more than you.

Everything else people read out of Auction Insights is inference. Sometimes good inference. It is still yours, not Google's, and a dashboard that prints it as a fact is lying with a straight face.

September 2024: the fields left the dashboard

Auction Insights used to be dashboardable. The Data Studio connector for Google Ads carried the fields, and reports were built on them.

Google's own connector documentation now carries the notice. New data sources lost access on 24 August 2024. Existing data sources lost access on 23 September 2024. Twelve fields went with it, named in Google's list: Auction Insight - Domain, Auction Insight - avg. position, Abs. top of page rate, Position above rate, Impr. share, Outranking Share, Overlap Rate, Top of page rate, Auction Insight - Store display name, Shopping impression share, Shopping outranking share, Shopping overlap Rate.

The documentation answers the obvious question in advance, and the answer has no soft edge:

Google's advice to anyone who had built on those fields was to take them out: "we recommend removing these fields from your reports and charts."

It also closed the obvious workaround in its own FAQ: "Does it matter which connector I use to get Auction Insights? No. This change will impact Auction Insights data regardless of the connector that is used to access it. These include (but are not limited to) the Google Ads, BigQuery, and Google Sheets connectors."

One naming note, because it matters when you go looking for these pages. Google announced in April 2026 that Looker Studio becomes Data Studio again, and the rollout is visibly unfinished: on 19 August 2026 lookerstudio.google.com returned a 301 to datastudio.google.com, while datastudio.google.com returned a 302 straight back to lookerstudio.google.com/overview. Either name reaches the product. The deprecation notice sits under both.

Google still publishes two auction insights templates

I went through the public gallery for the previous piece in this cluster, so I already had the list of every Google Ads template Google publishes there. Two of the thirty five are auction insights templates, and both are still listed, both credited to the Data Studio Team.

I opened them again on 19 August 2026, signed out, the way any visitor arrives:

• [Sample] Google Ads Search Auction Insights. Six pages: Summary, Day Wise Auction Details, Campaign Level, Ad Group Level, Keyword Level, Device Level.
• [Sample] Google Ads Shopping Auction Insights. Five pages: Summary, Day Wise Metrics, Campaign Level, Ad Group Level, Device Level.

The scorecards across the top read Avg. CPC $0.00, Impressions 0, Investment $0.00, each labelled unavailable. Every auction insights table below them renders a dataset configuration error instead of data. The chart titles are still there, still naming the fields that were removed: Impressions Share, Abs. top of page rate & Top of page rate, Position above rate & Outranknig Share. That last one is Google's typo, and it has outlived the data it was labelling.

Two limits on that measurement, because they matter. I read the templates signed out, against sample data, not connected to a live account. And a broken sample report is a correlation, not a proof: I cannot show from the outside that these two specifically fail because of the September 2024 removal. I can say that these are the only two auction insights templates in Google's own gallery, that they are the ones whose tables do not draw, and that Google's own documentation says the fields they are built on are gone.

What the API says today

The metrics exist in the Google Ads API. Six of them arrived in v11, all on the Search side; there are no Shopping auction insight metrics in the API, although the report has three. Google's field reference marks each of them with one line: this metric is not publicly available. On the developer forum the position is dated and specific. In June 2025 Google's team wrote that "the whitelisting program for this particular feature is currently closed, so we're unable to add new people to have access at this time". Earlier answers said less than that, which is worth knowing if you are reading old threads.

I wanted the current answer rather than a forum thread, so I asked the API directly this morning, on API v24, against a normal (non-manager) account:

SELECT campaign.id,
       segments.auction_insight_domain,
       metrics.auction_insight_search_impression_share
FROM campaign
WHERE segments.date DURING LAST_7_DAYS

Google's reply, verbatim:

Then I ran the control, same account, same seven days:

So the gate is on the auction insight family specifically, and not on impression share as an idea. Note the wording Google chose: the developer does not have access. This test cannot separate the token from the account, and it does not need to. Either way the metrics do not arrive. You can chart how much of the auction you missed. Charting who took it needs an allowlist you cannot join.

This is worth knowing before you buy a Google Ads reporting tool, because it bounds what any of them can contain. If a vendor shows you competitor domains on a live dashboard, there are four possibilities: they are allowlisted, somebody is pasting a CSV in by hand, the screen is a mock, or they are not using your Google Ads data at all. That last one is a whole product category. Competitive intelligence tools build share of voice by crawling search results themselves, which needs no allowlist and no access to your account. It is a different dataset with different failure modes, and it does not tell you who was in your auctions. It tells you who was on the page.

What Performance Max gives you, and what it does not

Auction insights exists for Performance Max, segmented into Search and Shopping. It arrives without the level you would act on: no keyword rows, no ad group rows, because Performance Max has neither. So in an account where a large share of budget sits in Performance Max, the report answers a coarser question than the one you asked, and the campaign is the smallest unit you can point at.

Two sibling reports have the same shape of problem, from different directions. The search terms report is censored by a privacy threshold and buckets the leftovers without cost. Conversion columns keep moving after you send the report, because Google credits a conversion to the day of the click.

What you can automate instead

The impression share family is fully available and answers a narrower question:

• Search impression share. The share of impressions you got out of the impressions you were eligible for.
• Search lost IS (budget). The share you missed because the budget ran out.
• Search lost IS (rank). The share you missed because your Ad Rank was too low.

Those three add up to a complete account of your own eligibility, which is most of what sends people to Auction Insights. "Are we losing ground?" is answerable from your own data. "Who is taking it?" is not.

Two things to get right when you put them on a dashboard. Impression share is a ratio, so it cannot be summed across campaigns or across days: a dashboard that adds impression share is producing a number with no meaning. If you need an account level figure, rebuild it rather than averaging: divide impressions by impression share to get the eligible impressions Google estimated, total both columns, then divide again. And Google reports these as a share of an eligibility it estimates, so the size of a meaningful move depends on how many impressions sit under the ratio. On a campaign with steady volume, a sustained slide over several weeks is worth acting on and a single week's wobble is not. On a campaign with a few hundred impressions the ratio moves on its own and should not be charted at all.

What decision the report changes

Fair question, given everything above: if the report is thresholded, pairwise and silent about anyone quiet, what is it for?

One decision, mostly. Your own lost impression share to rank starts rising, and you have two candidate explanations: your ads and landing pages got worse, or somebody else got more aggressive. Those lead to opposite actions. Auction insights is the only place that separates them: a domain appearing at high overlap with a high position above rate says the auction changed around you. Nothing in your own account can tell you that.

For everything else, monthly is enough, and a good deal of the time the honest answer is that this report is a diagnostic you open when a number moves, not a monitor you keep.

What this means for my own template

Google Ads Vitals cannot show Auction Insights either, and it goes further than that: it does not show the impression share family at all. It reads a campaign level export with eight columns, so cost, clicks, conversions and value are what it has to work with. Nothing on that dashboard tells you who else was in the auction, and no future version of it will until Google reopens the allowlist.

Impression share is a fair thing to ask for and it is available to any tool that reads it from the API rather than from a CSV. Mine does not, today. The competitor question stays where it lives either way: in the Google Ads interface, pulled by a person, on a day of your choosing.

Sources and method

Everything above comes from Google's own documentation, from the Google Ads API, or from templates Google publishes. The two measurements are reproducible.

The API test used the Google Ads API v24 on 19 August 2026, against one ordinary advertiser account, and reports only the error strings Google returned. No account figures appear anywhere in this article.

The gallery test opened Google's published templates at datastudio.google.com/open/<id> while signed out, on 19 August 2026. That URL renders public reports without a login, which is the only way to read them from the outside.

• Google Ads Help, Use auction insights to compare performance: what the report compares, the six Search columns, the activity threshold, and the 10% impression share floor.
• Data Studio documentation, Connect to Google Ads: the deprecation dates, the twelve removed fields, and the line about no exceptions.
• Google Cloud Blog, April 2026: Looker Studio is Data Studio.
• Google Ads API v24, live query, 19 August 2026: METRIC_ACCESS_DENIED, plus the three impression share metrics that returned rows.
• Google Ads API developer forum: the allowlist for auction insight metrics is closed.
• Google's public Data Studio gallery: [Sample] Google Ads Search Auction Insights and [Sample] Google Ads Shopping Auction Insights, opened 19 August 2026.

Questions people actually ask

WRITTEN BY
Olha · clinic data analyst

I build the reporting our managers open every morning at a multi-branch medical clinic — and package it so other practices don't have to start from scratch.

Published on 19 August 2026. Two limits are worth repeating outside the body text. The gallery templates were read signed out, against sample data, not against a connected advertiser account, so a report that fails there might fail for a reader who is signed in for a different reason; what the read establishes is that the two auction insights templates are the ones whose tables do not draw, and Google’s own documentation says the fields they are built on were removed. The API test proves that this developer token, on this account, on v24, is refused those metrics. It cannot prove that no account anywhere is allowlisted, and Google’s documentation says some are.

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