Pay-per-click campaigns can increase brand recognition, produce prospects, and increase traffic. However, PPC marketing can take a lot of work to execute properly, particularly with many rivals competing for the same audience.
That’s why competitive analysis is so critical. It will assist you in comprehending the strategies employed by your rivals and learning more about their Google Ads tactics.
An efficient PPC competitive study entails six essential steps:
- Identify your competitors
- Analyze their PPC strategy
- Analyze their ad copy and landing pages
- Identify their target audience
- Analyze their budget and ad spend
- Analyze their performance and ROI
- Step 1: Identify Your Competitors
- Knowing your competitors is a good spot to start when conducting any competitive analysis.
Don’t skip this step, even if your business is well-established and you have comprehensive information about your rivals. There are always new businesses entering a market or growing that might now be a rival.
Utilize internal resources to recognize rivals (your sales and marketing teams are likely already conscious of who is out there), but are alsosome excellent tools are also available.
You can conduct ad research using SEMRush and compare the effectiveness of your campaigns, price strategies, and ads to those of your rivals using Google Ads Auction Insights (see below).
Step 2: Analyze Their PPC Strategy
You can evaluate their PPC approach once you are aware of your competitors. To cover both organic and paid channels, you should consider how advertisers combine SEO and PPC strategies. Here are some practical methods for doing that.
Keyword Research
Knowing which keywords your competitors rank for should be simple if you’ve already performed a competitive analysis for SEO.
But it’s worthwhile to carry out the same practice for PPC because you might miss some terms or expressions for paid advertising.
To find out which keywords your rivals are bidding on, use tools like SEMRush’s Keyword Gap tool.
To determine how cost-effective a keyword is, it is important to consider traffic and CPC. You can use this to find any possible weaknesses in your keyword strategy.
Ad Placement Analysis
Look at the locations where the advertisements of your rivals are running. Are they mainly visible on websites, social media platforms, or search engine results pages (SERPs) like YouTube?
Analyze this data to find possible locations for your advertisements, and be open to trying different things to see how well your content performs. Use Similarweb to carry out this.
Monitor their Search Results
Use paid or free tools like the ones we’ve already mentioned to get an idea of your competitor’s search engine ranking, the ad copy they used, and ad spending. Your ad copy and bidding plan will benefit from this.
Use Ad Intelligence Tools
You can view the past results of your rivals’ advertising campaigns using tools for competitive intelligence like Spyfu. Their ad spending, click-through, and conversion rates fall under this category.
Step 3: Analyze Their Ad Copy and Landing Pages
To increase interaction and conversion, content is crucial. Your audience is unlikely to click or stick around for very long if your ads and landing pages don’t reflect their interests and requirements.
Ad Copy Analysis
Looking at what your competitors are doing can be a great method to help you improve copy performance. What are they promoting as their unique selling factors and how are they positioning their goods or services?
To begin, ponder the following:
- Are they using particular keywords in ad copy?
- What is the tone of the content or approach, e.g. formal, friendly, humorous?
- What imagery or video content are they using to drive clicks?
- What type of CTAs are they using?
- Do the colors used in ads tie in with their brand?
Landing Page Analysis
Your conversion rate can be greatly improved by a strong landing page. To encourage click-through, the content must be compelling, speak to your target group, and be well-structured.
Additionally, make sure the copy on your landing page corresponds with their place of origin. Does the landing website for a Facebook ad, for instance, correspond to what the visitor anticipated reading about? Does it match the Facebook ad’s theme and style?
Locating the top-performing landing sites of your rivals can be done with the aid of Google’s auction report. Make a list, then glance at it. What’s effective, and why? What could you improve upon or be inspired by?
Consider conversion rate improvement to maximize your efforts.to turn prospects into leads or customers.
Step 4: Identify their Target Audience
You can determine whether you’re on the right track with your PPC targeting or whether there are buyer personas you’re overlooking by understanding the target audience of your competitors.
Time to start your study. Look at the demographics that your rivals’ PPC campaigns are aiming at. What media outlets do they employ? What job titles or levels of seniority are they seeking if it’s B2B? Is there a specific age range or gender description if it’s B2C?
You can use tools like SimilarWeb, AHREFs, or Google Ads Keyword Planner to help you identify target groups.
Step 5: Analyze their Budget and Advertising Spend
Get the most out of your PPC campaigns as keyword bidding becomes more challenging and marketing funds become more constrained.
See what their budgets are and when they are allocating their funds and resources by looking at your rivals. You can do this by:
- Using ad intelligence tools (e.g. Spyfu, or AdGooroo)
- Analyze search engine rankings
- Monitor competitor ads and how often they appear
- Look at their online presence including social media
- Network with industry players and learn more about budget spends
- These strategies will assist you in better understanding your sector and identifying the audience interaction strategies that your rivals are employing.
Step 6: Analyze their Performance and ROI
It’s crucial to comprehend the PPC activity, success, and ROI of your rivals.
The best method to do this is to analyze industries or standard benchmarks for your company. You can establish KPIs for your campaigns that are realistic and doable by using this Wordstream example from 2022 on Google and Microsoft ads.
Average positions, cost per click, cost per lead, CTR, impression share, cost per acquisition, and conversion rate are measures you should comprehend and monitor.
It may take some time to perfect your PPC campaigns, so be prepared to evaluate, modify, and test.
Learn how to analyze competitor’s PPC campaigns
For your PPC to remain ahead of the competition, it’s crucial to regularly conduct a competitive analysis. The basics of paid search, PPC campaigns, reporting, GA4, and other topics will all be covered in DMI’s brief PPC course. Today, reserve your space!