Liam Walsh
Liam is a Co-Director at Intelligency and heads up the agency's Digital Intelligence & Paid Social activity. Over the last decade, he has worked with brands from the world of sports such as Premier League clubs to entertainment such as Channel 4 and Disney.
Google Ads has quietly rolled out a new feature that gives advertisers a view of how their weekly spending and click performance compare to businesses it considers similar. Appearing in the account Overview section as a Spend Benchmarks report, it is one of those updates that sounds straightforward but deserves a little more scrutiny before you act on it. Used wisely, it can provide genuinely useful context. Used without that scrutiny, it could nudge you into spending decisions that do not actually reflect your business needs.
What the Report Shows
The Spend Benchmarks report sits within your Google Ads account Overview and compares your weekly ad spend and clicks against a peer group of businesses Google has grouped with yours. The comparison takes into account factors including your industry and the markets you advertise in. It is a simple enough concept: a snapshot of where you sit relative to comparable advertisers on the same platform.
Why the Context Matters
The limitation worth understanding is that similar businesses are not always comparable businesses. Two companies operating in the same industry and geography could have completely different margins, average order values, customer lifetime values and growth strategies. An advertiser spending less than the peer benchmark might be running a highly efficient account with strong returns. One spending significantly more might be chasing volume at the expense of profitability. The benchmark does not know which situation applies to you, and neither does the recommendation to increase spend that sometimes accompanies it. That recommendation is worth being aware of: a peer comparison that comes packaged with a prompt to spend more can easily start to feel like a target rather than a reference point.
How to Use It Properly
The Spend Benchmarks report is most useful as a prompt for questions rather than a directive for action. If your spend sits significantly below peers and your campaigns are constrained by budget, that is worth investigating. If your spend is higher but your returns are strong, the gap tells you very little. The metrics that actually determine whether your budget is right are your cost per acquisition, your return on ad spend, and whether incremental spend produces incremental profit at an acceptable level. Treat the benchmark as one piece of context alongside those figures, not as a measure of whether you are doing enough.
