The Google AdWords blog has announced a new tool for advertisers to monitor competitive activity for their market. Aiming to create more transparency to AdWords, Google has launched 'Analyze competition' in the Opportunities tab, initially available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface, but this is likely to be rolled out soon and should help to add an extra layer of data and knowledge to allow advertisers to improve their campaigns.

The 'Analyze competition' option enables advertisers to examine their account activity over the past two weeks and it lists categories that represent the products or services being advertised. These categories are based on actual Google.com search terms and are matched up against the advertiser's keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with their account, the advertiser will see a bar graph displaying the campaign performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category.

By hovering over the data in the 'Competitive Range' column, advertisers will be able to see more details such as the exact size of the competitive range, the mean and median performance levels for this range, as well as data on the absolute top and bottom performers. This data can also be exported to a .csv file.

Google stresses that the 'Analyze competition' data is anonymous, and as part of their commitment to privacy, they don't reveal information about any advertiser's identity. However, the data can be very useful to get new ideas for an account and to consider how advertising goals are being achieved to allow a better focus on the most relevant metrics. If one or more AdWords campaigns are performing poorly in comparison to the competition, an advertiser can now get some more insight into changes that could help to improve the campaign.