There’s a new tool in AdWords that allows you to compare your account performance against your competition. You can access it by going to your Opportunities tab and clicking on link Analyze Competition. It’s limited in terms of what data you can analyze and currently provides comparisons for the following metrics: impressions, clicks, CTR, and Avg. position. This is a good start, but what I’d really like to see are CPC and conversion metric comparisons, as impressions and clicks are heavily driven by budget and you can quickly increase those numbers by increasing your budget.
Data is available for the last two weeks or so, and there is no option to change this date range, which would be necessary if you wanted to review trends. Filtering is also available allowing you to select specific countries and states. A major con of the Analyze Competition tool is that it’s pretty vague about who your competition is, for obvious privacy reasons. It separates out competitors bidding on the same terms under several industries and provides data for those verticals. However, some of the competitors bidding on your keywords may not be your actual competition for your sub-vertical or areas of specialty.
Overall, an interesting tool to check out and even more data from Google to arm you with information to potentially act upon. However, in order to be truly useful, the data would have to be more specific to your true competition and include CPC and conversion metrics. Meanwhile, I recommend checking out some of the other software sites, such as KeywordSpy or SpyFy that do offer more detailed information about your competition.