Google Ads Is Now Showing You What Your Competitors Spend

Google Ads is rolling out a report that tells you what businesses like yours are spending and how many clicks they are getting for it. It sits on your account Overview page and it is called Spend Benchmarks. It is interesting, and it is also the kind of number that gets accounts into trouble if you treat it as a target. Here is what the report actually shows and how to use it without letting Google set your budget for you.

What The Spend Benchmarks Report Shows

Thomas Eccel reported the updated version on September 16. You will find it under Account "Overview" inside Google Ads, and it is rolling out to accounts now rather than being available everywhere at once.

The report puts your numbers next to a comparison set that Google builds for you.

• Your spend against similar businesses. A direct comparison of what you are putting into the platform versus what comparable advertisers are putting in.
• Competitor spend figures. An aggregate number representing the businesses Google considers similar to yours.
• Click volume comparisons. What those businesses are getting for their money next to what you are getting for yours.
• A plain verdict. Whether you are spending more, less, or about the same as the comparison group.

In the screenshot that was shared, one advertiser's weekly spend came in at 284 euros against a competitor figure of 268 euros. That advertiser pulled 912 clicks against 765 for the comparison set. So slightly more spend, meaningfully more clicks.

How Google Decides Who Your Competitors Are

This is the part worth understanding before you react to anything the report tells you. Google builds the comparison group using factors like "industry and where you advertise," according to Eccel's write-up.

Industry and geography. That is the basis for the comparison.

Think about what that leaves out. It does not know your margins. It does not know your average order value. It does not know whether you sell a 40 dollar product or a 40,000 dollar service. It does not know whether you are running a brand campaign that converts at 30 percent or a cold prospecting campaign that converts at 2 percent.

Eccel made the same point in his own caution on the report, noting that "two businesses in the same industry can have completely different margins, conversion rates, AOVs and strategies." His advice was to make spending decisions on profitability rather than on Google's benchmarking.

My Take On Competitor Spend Data

I like having the data. I do not like what it does to people.

One of the biggest mistakes I see is an advertiser finding out a competitor spends more and immediately deciding that is the problem. It usually is not. If your account is not profitable at 2,000 dollars a month, it will not become profitable at 4,000 dollars a month. You will just lose money faster.

The number that matters is whether the next dollar you put into the account comes back with a friend. Nothing on the Spend Benchmarks report answers that question. It is a peer comparison, not a profitability analysis.

Keep in mind, Google has a commercial interest in you spending more. That does not make the data dishonest. It does mean the framing is going to lean one direction, and you should read it knowing that.

How To Actually Use It

The report is genuinely useful for one thing, which is context. If you have never had any sense of whether your budget is unusual for your category, now you do. Here is the process.

1. Look at clicks per dollar, not total spend. If you are getting more clicks than the comparison group on similar money, your account is working. If you are getting fewer, look at Quality Score and ad relevance before you look at budget.
2. Check your own profitability first. Pull your actual cost per conversion and your close rate. That is the number that decides whether you should spend more, not the benchmark.
3. Treat a large gap as a question, not an instruction. If competitors are spending three times what you are, find out whether they are in a different part of your market before you try to match them.
4. Ignore it entirely on small accounts. On very low spend, the comparison group is too broad to tell you anything useful about your specific business.

If the report tells you that you are getting fewer clicks for the same money, the fix is almost never more budget. It is usually cost per click, and that comes back to Quality Score and how to lower your CPC. Fix efficiency before you fix scale.

And if you are going to use this report to make a budget case to somebody, pair it with your own numbers. A benchmark on its own is a weak argument. A benchmark next to your real cost per conversion and return is a strong one.

Question to Answer:

Do you know your actual cost per conversion and your profit per sale well enough to say whether spending more would make you money?

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