When you’re a PPC marketer, a big part of your job is analysis. On any given day, you may be analyzing individual campaigns, reevaluating the goals for a particular campaign, or looking from a high level at the effectiveness of your overall PPC marketing strategy.
One task we recommend adding to your quarterly or annual to-do list? Running a PPC competitive analysis.
Regularly analyzing your competitors allows you to see your own strategy from a new perspective, sparking ideas on how you can do things better.
Interested? We thought you might be. Read on as we walk you through how to run a PPC competitive analysis, step by step.
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Helpful tools to use in a PPC competitive analysis
Before we get started, it will be helpful for you to have some PPC competitor analysis tools at the ready. These can include professional competitor research tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, SpyFu, and Similar Web. Although, you may be able to glean the insights you need from free tools such as Google Ads (especially Google Ads Auction Insights).
1. Make a list of your competitors
As with any competitive research, step one involves making a list of your competitors. Remember to include any brands who directly compete with you, as well as any who compete with you on PPC — as these can be different.
For example, a hotel brand may want to include other hotel chains with similar locations and amenities, as well as any travel websites that bid on the same keywords, such as Expedia or TripAdvisor.
2. Keep your audience in mind
It’s important to know your audience, as you’ll want to directly compare the ad campaigns your competitors are using to reach that target audience. However, you also want to make sure that you’re aware of how your audiences may be different. For example, do your competitors’ users have the same needs as yours do, or do they have different purchasing priorities?
Throughout the PPC competitive analysis, also consider whether your competitors are targeting additional audiences, and whether any of those audiences may be good targets for your brand, too.
You can find audience demographic information using tools like SimilarWeb. You can see your competitors’ audience broken down by geography, gender, and age group:
3. Research each competitor’s PPC presence
At last, it’s time to dig into the nitty gritty. What’s your competitor’s PPC marketing strategy?
Which keywords are you both bidding on? Are you using the same (or different) ad formats and channels, including traditional search ads, Google Shopping, and Display?
Tools like SpyFu and SimilarWeb will show you where your competitors are advertising, top keywords, and even a sneak peek at some of their latest display ads. SpyFu also reveals additional details such as ad spend and click-through rates.
4. Review their ad copy and landing pages
Now that you know where your competitors are advertising, take a look at how they’re speaking to their audience.
What’s their approach to ad copy? What are they doing with their landing pages that’s different from your approach? Most importantly, is there anything they’re doing that’s worth adapting for your PPC marketing strategy?
5. Compare your ad performance
You’ve reached the last step of your PPC competitive analysis and you have one last question to answer:
How well is your competitor’s PPC strategy working for them?
For answers, check out the Google Ads Auction Insights report. Here, you can view data on the other advertisers participating in the same auctions you are (i.e. your competitors). This data includes KPIs like:
- Impression share
- Overlap rate
- Outranking share
- Position above rate
- Top of page rate
- Absolute top of page rate
You can view these insights for multiple keywords, ad groups, and campaigns across your Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns.
Staying competitive with PPC
To stay ahead of the competition, you need to know where the competition is today. That’s where a PPC competitive analysis comes in. Trust yours to the paid search experts at Your Marketing People. Contact us today.
