The Ads History report (located under Keyword Research in the Advertising toolkit) is a keyword research report that shows you all of the domains that bid on the queried keyword and had a PPC ad in any of Google's top 8 paid positions over the past twelve months. 

• Use your competitors' experience to eliminate trial and error in your own campaigns and bid with confidence

• See how many advertisers you compete with and how often they bid on their keywords

• Identify what time of year you’ll experience the highest levels of competition

Analyze Past Ads

Semrush Ads History Report is perfect for allowing you to view past ads in order to analyze the performance of a specific keyword in paid search. After querying a keyword in the search bar of this report, you'll see a table of all of the advertisers that had their ads in Google's top 8 positions for this keyword's results page over the past 12 months.

The number in the blue box (dark blue when highlighted) next to a corresponding month represents the position of the domain's advertisement. To be sure, you can always cross reference this report with the other Ads History report (in Advertising Research) and the Advertising Positions report. 

Knowing if a keyword was previously successful in ranking can prevent you from wasting your time searching for keywords and instead of putting that focus on other tasks such as perfecting the actual ad copy. Not only that, but you can also see the amount of ad traffic, ad traffic price and the total number of ads for that domain.

Improve Based on Competitor Performance

Getting insight into how your competitors are performing is key in gaining the edge for ad placement. Semrush allows you to see exactly how your competitors are performing for certain keywords and how they ranked monthly for that keyword.

For each month, you will also see the last seen ad triggered by a particular keyword and its position in SERPs.

See how long a keyword has been used. If a competitor has been using it for more than a couple of months, it has most likely earned them a lot of business.

If a keyword was used only for a short time, you can infer that it either:

1. Didn’t bring a lot of traffic or

2. it was used because it was relevant to a season, holiday, or special event.

By researching PPC keywords, you will be able to discover new keyword ideas and conversion opportunities. By clicking on a particular domain, you will launch the Domain Ads History report, which you can use to conduct competitive PPC analysis.

Identify Advertising Trends

Identifying trends within Google is always an important step in optimizing your campaigns and this remains no different for advertising. Understanding how certain keywords rank during certain times of the year can allow you to plan out your campaigns ahead of time, knowing when certain keywords are giving you the highest ROI.

Let’s say you are a store specializing in Christmas decorations, you can enter the keyword "ornament" into the Ads History report and see what months it is ranking the highest (i.e. the holiday months).