You know pretty well that PPC campaigns are proven tactics to get your target audience attracted to your business and then convert them to your customers. Are you also making PPC campaigns but unable to get more customers? What can be the problem here? Are you conducting competitor analysis for PPC? No? Thinking about how to conduct a competitor analysis for PPC?
No need to think anymore. Just read my blog to get the answer and many more.
Importance of Competitor Analysis for PPC
When you’ll begin to develop your strategy while making a fresh PPC account, the first thing you’ll want to know is how the competitors are representing themselves so that you can get a solid base to develop your PPC campaign. Again, you’ll want to know about your competitors’ activities when you’ll regularly optimize your PPC campaign. That’s how a competitor analysis is an inseparable part of an agency’s strategy. When you’ll want that your clients outperform their competitors, you’ll need to know both their strengths and weaknesses and compare them to make a unique place for your client in the market different from others.
Read also: Tips and Tricks to Perform Competitor Analysis for Social Media
The importance of competitor analysis for PPC is as follows:
Informs you about the competitors’ keyword strategy:
You come to know which targeted keywords your competitors are focusing on and what amount of money they are spending for it. You can recognize gaps in the campaigns of your clients and thus save them money.
Learn more: How to do Keyword Research for PPC Campaign
Lets your company modify marketing benchmarks:
You can identify opportunities to improve the strategies of your client.
Discloses the way to position the business of your client:
You can do this by keeping the attention of the customers of your clients with new changes, ideas, and trends.
Offers a competitive benefit for your clients:
You can offer your clients a competitive benefit by knowing their competitor’s creative strategy and ad copy through PPC competitor analysis.
Related: Key Benefits of Using PPC Management
Avoid wasting money on snake oil marketing policies:
A natural practice that you’ll see all over the year is that some so-called best marketing practices suddenly pop up and disappear. You don’t need to waste your budget on such policies or practices. A large number of your competitors will invest money in such policies, you just need to watch their results and get experience from there.
Modify your goals:
A competitor analysis will let you know about the latest marketing trends, the gaps that exist in the market, and more. So, you can modify your goals for PPC campaigns based on that knowledge.
So, PPC campaign competitor analysis holds a lot of importance.
How to Recognize Your Competitors for PPC?
This is the most vital step while analyzing your competitors for PPC because if you are not aware of it who your competitors are, how would you do PPC competitor research? Get answers to these questions:
- Who is working with the identical keywords as your customer or client?
- Who has taken the top place and taken away the clicks from your client’s website and has reduced your client’s website’s conversion rate?
Rather than looking for keywords and doing keyword research, look for the answer to these questions because you won’t want to get into fierce competition with competitors of your client. PPC competitor analysis tools will help you to get information about your client’s competitors which I’ll discuss later.
Again, you need to answer some questions about your client’s competition.
Who are the competitors of your client?
Get into your client’s particular business details to know who their competitors are. Consider what services or products they offer, where’s their location, who are their customers, and the like. Your clients can give you an idea of their competitors, but always remember that their offline and online competitors are completely different. Make use of Google Ads to get metrics like top-of-page-rate, outranking share, impression share, and the like.
Generate an action plan on sectors your competitor is lacking considering the above metrics.
What type of competitions are they?
Deciding it is equally crucial because you won’t like to compare your client with a competitor having a quite lower budget. Some commonly seen competitor types in PPC are as follows:
- Direct Competitors: Dealing with the same service/product as your client does.
- Indirect Competitors: Offering a service/product that fulfills a specific need but in a varied way.
- Corresponding Shopping Engines: Online platforms that are dealing with multiple products in a single place where you can easily compare features and prices.
- Affiliates and Marketing Partners: They are promoting the brand of your client or their competition, generally, for a specific commission fee.
- Resellers: Other brands selling the products of your client or reselling their products/services.
- Search arbitrages: They bid on specific keywords just to bring users to other search platforms to get more traffic.
- Online Trading Agencies (OTA): These are trading agencies that are doing business online.
- No trademark: They are doing business online with no trademarks.
Closely focus on PPC keyword trends of top brands or perform a direct comparison of channel activities between your client’s competitors and your client’s domains to get clearer visions.
The places of their competition with you?
You won’t be able to trace each place on which your competitors are running their ads on the internet. You need to take care of the following places where you need to give more time when doing a competitor analysis for PPC.
Location:
- Are the competitors local, national, or international?
Platforms:
- Are they primarily running ads on Facebook Ads or Google Ads?
- Are they running any retargeting campaigns?
Devices:
- Are they deeply focused on desktop, tab, mobile, or a mix of all?
Timing:
- Do they run their ads during holidays or specific promotions?
- Are they used to turning off their ads during weekends?
Consider using labels within publishers’ or third-party bidding tools to observe any modifications in your client’s top-performing keywords. Setting up automatic alerts will offer you bidding suggestions in your inbox.
What is the reason for their competition?
I have briefly discussed the types of your competitors above. The reason for their competition will also vary based on their types. For example, your direct competitors will have the same motive as yours. They will want to increase traffic and conversion to earn profit.
Again, affiliates will want to earn a small commission by selling a specific brand’s product/service. Search arbitrages will like to drive traffic away from one brand (Adidas) to another (Nike). Your competitors can also bid on the keywords of your competitor only to price you out of the bidding.
Mostly, you’ll find that your competitors have the identical motive as you. So, you can’t surpass your competitors by bidding alone. You always need to review your competitor’s actions by having competitor analysis with a suitable tool to get better results.
How to do Competitor Analysis for PPC?
Performing competitor research for PPC will let your clients know about marketing strategies, as well as, the value of your company. After you have completed the primary list of competitors of your client, you need to check the following things to get deeper into your clients’ competitors’ information. Let’s know how to do competitor research for PPC:
Recommended reading: How to do Competitor Analysis for Social Media
1. Look for the PPC Keywords of Your Competitors:
Use any reliable research tool for keywords like Google Keyword planner, SEMRush, Ahrefs, and the like to know the search volume to assess the probable reach of Google Search Ads of your client. These tools will also let you determine the adversity to get to the SERP’s top and your client’s payable CPC.
Keywords of your competitors will give you a lot of insights into their advertising strategies. Keep your mind open to doing the research fruitfully. You’ll need a bit of brainstorming in some cases. You can know the following things from your competitors:
- Keywords and other opportunities you have missed.
- Whether you have to make any changes to your budget.
- Who are your present competitors?
- Probable threats.
- Keywords you need to buy that your competitors are not.
- Get fresh ideas for calls to action and ad copy.
2. Perform an Analysis of the PPC Landing Page:
Prepare a list of your competitor landing pages. Test the speed of their site- whether your’s is better or worse than its? Site speed is a vital thing to keep you competitive. Your prospects will prefer going to other sites if your site is too slow.
Now, check the calls to action, benefits, and offers. Compare how your site is. Can you find any places to improve? Jot down how you are going to have changes to your landing pages if it is necessary.
If you are checking landing pages for PPC competitor analysis, ask the following questions to improve:
- Is the landing page user-friendly?
- How is the site speed?
- What is your call to action?
- Are your offers more competitive than others?
- Are your benefits and key features competitive enough when compared with others?
- Do you need to include any benefits or key features?
- Overall, how is your page performance? Is there any need to change?
When you are done with the analysis of the landing page, check whether the ad in the landing page is appropriate for the landing page. Does the landing page contain the target keywords? Do they possess the exact level of conformity?
Get an overall view, and decide how Google can rate it. Utilize the website of your competitors to improve and develop your own. A/B test ideas and elements you have from your mentionable competitors’ pages to observe if they boost your landing page performance.
3. Evaluate Website Quality
Here, you need to test the functionality of the website of your client and how it performs compared to its competitors. Consider the following issues:
- The loading speed of your competitors’ websites,
- Consistency of their branding.
- Incorporation of a different type of CTA to get additional leads like the “book an appointment” button?
- Is the website user-friendly and easy to navigate?
- Do they have updated testimonials and easily accessible?
4. Analyze Ad Copy
Competitor research needs to let you check the present and historical ad history for competitors. Ad texts create a brand’s initial impression on potential clients. Testing their benefits, offers, features, and the like will let you know more about the way they attract customers. Examining the messages that cause clicks lets you see where you are lacking. They can include specific features, pricing, sales, and hours.
What seems different to you? How can you transform your ad copy depending on your view? Jot down the following things:
- Headlines
- Features
- Special features
- Calls to action
- Pricing
- Sales
- Discounts
After the ad copy analysis, also check the ad history for patterns. Do you find any trends or seasonality? Find the year’s busiest month with the ad history. Improved knowledge of seasonality will let you compensate for keyword bid alterations and traffic levels.
For example, you can think of having a sale during a slower time to get compensation for the higher advertising expenses during a busy season.
Utilize the ads of your competitors to get creative ideas for your ad copy. If your ads get more clicks, you’ll get increased suitable traffic to the landing pages. Remember to take benefit of the ad history to get more insights, not only of the ad copy.
5. Find Keyword Gaps and Keyword Competition:
Keyword research tools will let you know deeply about the keywords of your competitors. You can know which keywords they bid on and the amount they are investing there. You also can come to know for how long they are bidding on them.
You can choose keywords wisely for your PPC strategy after you have known well about your competitors’ keywords. You can decide to not bid on specific keywords because can’t afford them, or bid more on other keywords because that’s within your budget. If you discover that they aren’t bidding on certain keywords that are known as the keyword gap. You can invest more in those keywords because it will get increased traffic to your website without payment of any premium.
Be careful because your competitors might find out about your activities and sue you. Take benefit of any keyword gap because thus you can have traffic at a low cost. Just check the search volume. It might not be sufficient to offer you an actual competitive advantage.
6. Review Display Ads of Competitors:
Visit the websites of your competitors carefully. Mostly, you’ll see that they’re running remarketing campaigns and you’ll get valuable information about their retargeting strategy. Ensure to evaluate ad copy, CTAs, and images, used in the strategies of your client.
Top PPC Competitor Analysis Tools
• SEMRush
This analysis tool will help you analyze, improve, and plan your Google Ads campaign. It comes with features like PPC keyword tools, advertising, Product Listing Ads or PLA research, social media ad campaign, and position tracking tools. You’ll require adding a website to get your client’s largest competitors’ information, the best keywords, and more. It will also let you know the amount competitors are investing but the accuracy is questionable.
SEMRush can be a helpful tool for your clients who are running ads on various platforms.
• Ahrefs
It’s a versatile platform that offers tools for keyword research, link building, rank tracking, site audits, and competitor analysis. You can discover and analyze the competitiveness of innumerable keywords. Again, estimate traffic potential and different valuable metrics like average clicks, location-based search volume, and global search volume. This tool is right to optimize ad campaigns on Google and offers important information on low-potential and weak keywords so that your client’s money is not wasted.
• SpyFu
SpyFu gives you information on your competitors’ keywords, strategies, and bidding inside Google Ads. It lets you see each used keyword and each ad of your competitors. This tool lets you get in-depth knowledge of your rival’s ad strategies and the way to optimize your client’s ads.
• Meta Ads Library
Checking PPC mentions on social media is also crucial. Use this type of tool to look for ads throughout Meta products- presently active or not. Check out who is the creator of the ad, how it looks, and when they ran it. Prepare more effective ads for your clients by reviewing the competitors’ well-performing ads.
• Google Ads Auction Insights
This analysis tool can be helpful for you only if you run your client’s live campaign. It can offer you actionable information if you regularly check the “Auction Insights” tab and click it. It will let you compare the performance of your client with other competitors participating in the same auction.
• ispionage
This tool will offer you 7 years of information on keywords and PPC data for the top 3 search engines for your rivals. You can prepare your ad and get improved outcomes by using this information.
• Brandverity
This awesome tool will let you check, recognize, and exclude harmful ads from showing up on your top branded keywords.
Final Words
Now, you must have understood how to conduct a competitor analysis for PPC. If you have further queries or need any assistance with Google Ads services please contact digiSocial.