How Auction Insights works
The report samples the auctions your keywords entered and shows the other domains that competed alongside you. It does not expose their spend, but it does expose relative position, which is often more useful. You see which competitors share your auctions, how your impression share compares to theirs, and how often they appeared above you. Because it is scoped to auctions you actually entered, it is a mirror of your own targeting, not a full market map, and reading it as the latter is the most common mistake.
What the columns actually tell you
Impression share shows how often each advertiser appeared. Overlap rate shows how often a competitor showed up in the same auction as you. Outranking share shows how often your ad ranked above theirs when you both appeared, or the reverse. Top and absolute top rates show who is winning the premium positions. The signal that matters most is movement. A competitor whose overlap and impression share are climbing week over week is expanding into your space, and that trend is more actionable than any single snapshot.
Reading it for real decisions
A rising competitor overlap on your brand terms usually means someone started bidding on your name, which calls for a defensive brand check rather than a broad bid increase. A new entrant climbing on your core non-brand terms may explain a creeping cost per click better than any internal change. The danger is overreacting to a single high-overlap row, since sharing auctions with a large advertiser is normal. Trend and segment, by device and time, before you touch anything.
How iClick uses Auction Insights
iClick uses Auction Insights as an early-warning system rather than a scoreboard. A competitor whose overlap and top-of-page rate are trending up on high-value terms is flagged before the effect shows up as rising cost per click, so the response can be deliberate, whether that is defending brand, improving Quality Score, or ceding unprofitable auctions on purpose. The report is read at the campaign and keyword level, because account-wide averages hide the specific fights that matter.
