Competition (sometimes shortened to cmp) is a metric that reflects competition level associated with ad placement for a particular keyword.

In the Keyword Planner of Google Ads (formerly AdWords), you can find two columns indicating the competition for the given keyword idea.

GKP explains them as follows:

“Competition” shows how competitive ad placement is for a keyword, specific to the location and Search Network targeting options that you’ve selected. The level of competition—low, medium, or high— is determined by the number of advertisers bidding on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google.

“Competition (indexed value)” shows how competitive ad placement is for a keyword, specific to the location and Search Network targeting options that you’ve selected. The level of competition from 0-100 is determined by the number of ad slots filled divided by the total number of ad slots available.

In the newer version of Google’s advertising platform known as Google Ads, the competition is represented by the 0-100 range, while in the previous version known as Google AdWords, the competition is provided as a 0-1 range.

Competition	Indexed value in Ads	Indexed value in AdWords
Low	[0, 33]	[0.0000, 0.3333]
Medium	[34, 66]	(0.3333, 0.6667]
High	[67, 100]	(0.6667, 1.0000]

Note that the Competition value from Google Keyword Planner does not indicate the level of organic competition, that is the difficulty to rank organically. However, it can be used for estimating the overall competitive environment for a term in the related SERP.

In the end, Competition is one of the essential factors to consider when preparing a list of keywords for your paid campaigns. Still, it won’t tell much without other keyword metrics that show how many searches for a term happen on Google, and how much other advertisers pay for clicks from related ad placements. So, make sure you’re armed with all the necessary data to find the most fruitful and worthwhile keywords to target.

With one call to DataForSEO Google Ads API, you can get competition, CPC, and Search Volume data for up to 700 keywords. Besides that, we offer keyword metrics for Bing search. What’s more, DataForSEO Labs API can supply you with the same information, plus related SERP data and maximum, minimum, and average values for CPC, ad position, daily clicks, and cost.

Learn more about collecting data for PPC keyword research with our API in this article.

Related articles:

What is Search Volume?
What is CPC?