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Found a way to map competitor ad spend
Posted by on May 19, 2026 at 2:07 pmBeen doing paid search for over a decade and often when people asked "what do you think competitor xyz is spending?" I'd give them a vague estimate based on their impressions share from the auction insights tab.
But I found I can get a better answer when I reverse-engineered auctions insight via my campaign metrics. I checked with a friendly competitor for one of my clients and turns out the estimate can be pretty close.
It's all calculated based off your own CTR, CPC and Quality Score. There's a little bit of subjectivity involved though.
- You basically download the Auction Insights report for your account/campaign/ad group. Download your campaign metrics for the same timeframe.
- Calculate total available impressions (Impr / Search Impr. Share)
- Apply it to your competitor search impressions share to get their total impressions.
- Pull the "position above rate" from Auction Insights. This is to gather how aggressive they are in the auctions and how high their CTR might be. My formula says that anything above 60% gets a 1.25x multiplier on the CTR. Between 30-60% gets a 1x multiplier and anything below 30% gets 0.75x.
- Grab your CTR, times it by the multiplier, then multiply it by their impressions and you get their clicks.
- Now you need to calculate your quality score. You can do it via click-weighted or impression-weighted.
- Estimate their quality score. This is the subjective part. I go over their ads, their paid landing pages (oh no, did I click on their ads haha), and estimate how relevant their offering is. Then estimate how good theirs is vs your offering. You might want to play around with these.
- Calculate their CPC by using your CPC as the benchmark, then multiply it by the ratio between your quality score and theirs (e.g. your QS is 5, theirs is 6, so you do 5/6). This gives you their CPC.
- Calculate their clicks by their CPC and you get their spend.
There are quite a few steps, but you can probably feed this into AI to do this for you. That's what I did and I created a skill on Claude so it does it easily for me. I just feed it the data.
EDIT: Someone asked for a screenshot of how this could look. The above only gets you one data point for one competitor. Here I mapped out multiple competitors on a weekly timeframe.
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1 Reply
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Can you show an example screenshot?
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how do you account for ad scheduling? we used this method before but when working with a google team, their provided report showed that competitors were spending much less than calculated. what we deduced was that certain competitors were concentrating spend on only specific terms during specific hours.
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Auction insights show you the data for keywords for which you and your competitor are eligible. But there could be lots of keywords your competitor is advertising on, but you are not.
There is also display placements, youtube placements, discover network, lots of ad inventory your competitors could be spending lots of money on, but you cannot see.
Maybe I am missing something?
But, as it stands, I would not consider this data reliable or useful.
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