On 16 September 2026, PPC expert Thomas Eccel spotted a new Spend Benchmarks report in Google Ads, shown in the account overview: it compares the week's spend and clicks with those of businesses Google considers similar, and comes with an invitation to spend more. The figure gives advertisers an external reference point they were missing. It says nothing about margins or customer value, which separate two accounts that look comparable.
The facts
- The Spend Benchmarks report appears in the Overview section of the Google Ads account. Search Engine Roundtable described it on 16 September as rolling out, with no official timeline from Google. In the example published by Thomas Eccel, the account spends 284 euros a week against 268 for its peers, and gets 912 clicks against 765.
- Google states that the comparison is based on "things like industry and where you advertise". Neither the number of accounts in the peer group nor the definition of similar has been published.
- The report comes with a suggestion: "Increase your spend to get more". Thomas Eccel advises reading it as a reference point and letting the account's profitability decide the budget.
What is a peer spend comparison worth?
The reference point fills a gap. Until now, an advertiser judged its Google Ads spend against its own history, with no external point of comparison. The new report adds a scale: knowing whether you spend within the norm for your industry and your geographic area.
Yet Google only names those two criteria, and does not say whether account size, campaign type or total budget enter the calculation. Two businesses in the same industry and the same area can have margins, conversion rates, average order values and customer value that bear no relation to each other. The report also compares two quantities, spend and clicks, that the platform itself bills or produces. Neither measures what those clicks brought the advertiser.
Spend Benchmarks and Auction Insights: two comparisons of a different kind
The Auction Insights report compares the advertiser, according to Google's help page, with the other advertisers taking part in the same auctions, in other words with competitors it has really met. Spend Benchmarks compares it with a group assembled by Google, whose composition is not published and which has no established link with its real competition. The first describes observed competition, the second a reference average.
The suggestion to increase spend turns this context indicator into an implicit target. A budget adjustment is decided on the account's profitability and incremental return. The comparison comes from the company that sells the budgets it compares, and whose revenue grows with advertisers' spend, as we wrote in our op-ed on campaign automation.
AIxH's view
We only approve a budget adjustment after checking it against the account's margins and real profitability. Our Google Ads agency in Luxembourg reads this report as a piece of context, in the same way as automated recommendations, which are arbitrated one by one on the client's real conversions. If you run a Google Ads account, have a third party confirm the purpose of the spend before following an automated recommendation.
