Auction Insights - Visualization

Visualize auction insights data over time, broken down by domain, with filtering, directly in Data Studio.

If you ever tried to visualize auction insights in Data Studio, you might have noticed that time series charts of auction insights metrics (impression share, outranking share, ...), broken down by domain, throw an error when you apply a filter. This project aims to remedy that by providing a community visualization that keeps working and that you can use as a drop-in replacement for the standard time series.

Setup

• Open a Data Studio report that uses the Google Ads connector, or create a blank report and add your Google Ads account as a data source to that report.

• Enable community visualizations for the Google Ads connector:

  • Click on Resource > Manage added data sources in the top menu bar.
  • Click on Edit next to the Google Ads connector.
  • Click on Community visualizations access in the upper right corner and switch it to On.
  • Click Save, followed by Done and Close in the upper right to exit the data sources configuration.

• Add the community visualization to your report:

  • Click on the Community visualizations and components button in the top menu bar (next to Add a chart)
  • Click on + Explore more in the window that pops up.
  • Click on Build your own visualization.
  • Enter gs://time-series-viz/v1 in the field Manifest path.
  • Click Submit.
  • Click on Time Series and drag the new chart somewhere on your report.

• Configure the community visualization as follows (on the tab Data):

  • Drag a time dimension (such as Year, Month, Week or Day) to the Main Dimension field.
  • Drag Auction Insight - Domain to the Breakdown dimension field.
    (Or see here for shopping campaigns)
  • Drag an auction insight metric (such as Impr. share) to the Metric field.
    

Congratulations! You should now have a nice chart as seen above. At this point, you might want to add filters for a specific campaign or ad group.

Frequently asked questions

Does this support Shopping campaigns?

Yes! Just select Auction Insight - Store display name as the breakdown dimension and one of the supported metrics for Shopping (see table below).

	Search	Shopping
Main Dimension	Day, Week, Month, Year	Day, Week, Month, Year
Breakdown Dimension	Auction Insight - Domain	Auction Insight - Store display name
Metric	Impr. share, Overlap Rate, Outranking Share, Top of page rate, Abs. top of page rate	Shopping impression share, Shopping overlap rate, Shopping outranking share

Hosting it yourself (optional)

If you rather host the visualization yourself (which is totally optional), you can copy it to your own Cloud Storage bucket. You'll only need to do this the very first time you want to use this visualization in any report.

• Create a Cloud Storage bucket in your Google Cloud Platform project, if you don't have one yet.
• Fill in the variable CLOUD_STORAGE_BUCKET in deploy.sh based on the name of your bucket.
• Run ./deploy.sh. This will copy the visualization code to the specified bucket. Note that this command requires that you have gsutil installed and working.

At this point, you bucket should contain the files manifest.json, aiViz.json, aiViz.js, and aiViz.css.

Limitations

• Incompatible with data control
  Community visualizations are not compatible with the Data Studio data control. It is, however, possible to add a filter control with the dimension Account / description to select a specific account amongst the maximum 50 linked accounts.

• No keyword-level segmentation
  Keyword-level insights are not exposed by the Google Ads connector and can thus not be visualized. It is, however, possible to add filter controls to select a specific account, campaign, or ad group.

This is not an officially supported Google product.