The "Analyze competition" page shows how your account has performed in comparison to other Google advertisers. There are several sets of advertisers who you're compared to: those in your advertising category and then, within that group, those who have performed similarly to you.
Below are the details of how we determine these groups. Note that all of the competitor data that you see is aggregated and averaged, so it's entirely anonymous. You won't be able to know the exact advertisers who you are compared to, but you will be able to see how you're performing compared to advertisers in the same category.
1. Advertising categories
First, we analyze your performance in comparison to all other advertisers that we think are in the same category as you. Categories are themed groups that generally describe what we think is the subject of your advertising. By using categories, we can benchmark your Google Ads performance against that of other advertisers who advertise similar products or services.
For each category shown to you, your ads have appeared for searches that we think belong to that topic.
How to narrow down the category
If a category is blue, you can click it to explore more specific sub-categories within that topic. There are five levels of categories, each level being more specific than its parent. For example, the top-level category "Computers & Consumer Electronics" has the sub-category of "Computers" which in turn can be narrowed down even further to "Laptops" and so on.
How categories are formed
We reviewed all of the search terms that have triggered any ad. From that information, Google AI identified themes and used them to create a set of 7000 categories (with about 50 top-level categories) that are related to the products and services that we've seen from our advertisers. In addition to these search queries, we look at other signals like your ads' landing pages, keywords, and ad text when categorizing each ad group. It's possible that the chosen categories are ambiguous for a search term (for example, "apples" could be categorized as "Computers & Consumer Electronics / Computers" or as "Food & Groceries / Food / Produce / Fruit"). In this case, we use the context of the ad group, campaign, or account to influence which category that search term should be assigned to for the particular advertiser.
See search terms from each category
You can see the Google search terms that triggered your ad for each of the most specific sub-categories in your account. Click a category name to see more specific sub-categories. When the category name is no longer a link, you know you’re at the most specific sub-category -- this is where you’ll see a See Search Terms link that leads to a list of actual searches that are identified as relevant to that category. If you don't think that the category is appropriate for you, consider adding negative keywords or refining your existing keyword list to help prevent your ad from showing on those irrelevant searches.
Here are a few more details about categories:
- We compute benchmarks for each category in each country so you can see how targeting affects the market.
- All keywords that don't fit into one of these categories are aggregated into a section called "Uncategorized." This is essentially an "other" bucket for performance data that doesn't fit into one of the defined categories.
- We'll show a category if you've had at least one impression in the last two weeks in a category that we think that you're advertising in.
2. Similar advertisers
Within the group of advertisers from your category, we identify those that have performed similarly to you. We use this subset of advertisers to create the bar graphs and accompanying data. This way, you can see how you compare to just those advertisers who are similar to you and are likely to have a similar budget and scope of advertising.
