Google’s new Spend Benchmarks report shows how your ad spend compares with similar businesses. But the first public example suggests advertisers should be careful about treating peer spending as a target.
Google Ads is rolling out a new Spend Benchmarks report that compares an advertiser’s weekly spend and clicks with businesses Google considers similar.
The feature was first spotted by paid search specialist Thomas Eccel. Google does not appear to have publicly documented the report yet. The interesting part is not simply that Google is showing advertisers what their peers spend.
It is what the numbers actually say.
In Eccel’s example, the advertiser spent €284 over seven days, compared with €268 for its peers.
That is about 6% more spend.
But the same account generated 912 clicks, compared with 765 clicks for its peers, or roughly 19% more clicks.
That puts the advertiser’s implied average CPC at about €0.31, versus roughly €0.35 for the peer group.
So the advertiser appears to be getting clicks around 11% cheaper than its peers.
That makes the spend comparison much less useful on its own.
Knowing what similar advertisers spend can provide useful context, especially for agencies trying to understand whether a client’s budget is unusually high or low.
But similar businesses can have very different margins, conversion rates, customer values and sales economics.
An advertiser spending less than its peers could still be running a better business.
And an advertiser spending more could simply be wasting more money.
That distinction matters because the Spend Benchmarks interface also encourages advertisers to explore what they could get by increasing spend.
For marketers, the more important question remains whether the next dollar spent produces profitable incremental results, not whether competitors are spending more.
The first Spend Benchmarks example makes that point surprisingly well.
The advertiser spent 6% more than its peers, generated 19% more clicks, and appears to have paid about 11% less per click.
Google can tell you what similar advertisers are spending.
It still cannot tell you whether you should spend like them.
Conversation
Comments are reviewed before they appear. Be kind, be useful.