8 Tools for Analyzing Your Competitors in PPC

Analyzing your competitors is a critical strategy for creating a winning pay-per-click campaign. You need to know who your competitors are, what keywords they’re targeting, which keywords they’re ignoring, and what kind of ads they’re running.

You can get all of this information manually, but it’s easier and faster to get it from PPC competitor analysis software for competitive analysis.

Why you need to perform PPC Competitor Analysis

Analyzing what your competitors are doing will help you avoid their mistakes and imitate their successes. It’s like getting an inside scoop on what works and what doesn’t without having to experiment with every possibility yourself.

What PPC Competitor Analysis is Not

Although you’ll be analyzing your competitors’ PPC activity and gaining great insights from their advertisements, competitor analysis is not a own marketing strategy for copying their ads.

You’ll get creative ideas from their ad copy, images, keywords, and headlines, but it’s important to remember to avoid copying images and text word-for-word.

If you’re already getting decent results from PPC ads, analyzing your competition can help you increase your market share.

Start analyzing your competition today

To help you start analyzing your competitors, we’ve created a list of the top 8 PPC best website competitor analysis tools.

1. SEMRush (free to try – $99.95+)

If you’re running an SEO marketing campaigns, you’ve probably at least heard of SEMRush, if you haven’t already purchased a subscription. This is one of the best search engine optimization (SEO) tools/competitor analysis tool around, but it’s also excellent for PPC competitor analysis.

Features

• PPC ad research. Just type in the URL of a competitor and SEMRush will provide you with a list of their keywords, bidding strategies, monthly budget, allocated organic traffic, and ad text.
• Multiple platform tracking. SEMRush will provide you with data from Facebook and Bing PPC ad accounts.
• Display ad research. SEMRush has a large database full of PPC ads published across the world. If your competitors have ever published an ad through the Google Display Network, it’s probably in the SEMRush database.

The free version of SEMRush will give you an overview of data, but you’ll need a paid account to get the details for competitive analysis.

SEMRush is one of those versatile best competitor analysis tools that every digital marketer should have for marketing efforts.

2. Google Ads Auction Insights (free)

Google’s Action Insights tool makes it easy to compare your PPC ads with your competitors/competitive analysis, including overall performance and bidding strategy.

Features

When you use this tool, you’ll be able to view ad data from competitors bidding, competitors rank on the same keywords and ad placement auctions as you. Auction Insights will show you the following metrics:

• Impression share. This metric is a ratio of impressions received compared with eligible impressions. The higher your impression share, the more often your ads are being displayed for your keywords.
• Overlap rate. Your overlap rate shows how frequently your ads have been displayed next to your competitors’ ads. For example, if you see a competitor’s overlap rate of 10%, that means 10% of the time both of your ads were displayed at the same time.
• Outranking share. This metric tells you how often your ads outranked a competitor’s ad. Obviously, a high outranking share score is desirable. If your score is low, take note of who is outranking/search rankings you and do more research into their ads.

Google’s Action Insights is free and comes with your Google Ads account to spy on your competitors.

3. Facebook Ad Library (free)

The Facebook Ad Library is one of the most underused competitor analysis tool around. Born from the desire to provide transparency, the Facebook Ad Library will give you free access to all current ads published by your competitors.

Features

• Access to current ads. Just search for your competitors by name and you’ll get a list of ads they’re running on Facebook.
• Search by keyword. If you don’t know who all of your competitors are, you can also search for ads by keyword. These organic search results might not be from your competitors, but they might still be useful to you.
• Filter search results by media type. Once you get your search results, you can filter the ads by media type like images, memes, videos, and plain text.

Even if you don’t plan on running PPC ads on Facebook, check out what your competitors are publishing. You can use their ads to help determine your next moves on other PPC platforms.

4. What Runs Where ($299-$399)

The ads database from What Runs Where contains ads from more than 90,000 individual advertisers, which amounts to over 60 million advertisements. When you need ad data from your competitors/spy on your competitors, you can’t beat the insights from a database this large.

Features:

• See ads as displayed to users. You’ll see all of your competitors’ ads in detail as displayed to users, including images, text, and headlines.
• Three types of ad data. Get data for desktop native, desktop display, and mobile display ads.
• Ads come from across the internet. This ad database comes from across the internet, not just one platform like Google or Facebook.
• Deep, granular insights. What Runs Where will tell you which calls-to-action (CTAs) have been successful, where the ads have been running, and what keywords were associated with each ad.
• Filter results. Once you find your competitors/competitor research’ ads, you can filter your results by ad type, keyword, date, country, and other parameters.
• Separate affiliate campaigns. You can filter out ads from affiliate campaigns run by the main brand.

The information provided by What Runs Where will help you optimize your own PPC ad campaign to capture more of your competitors’ traffic.

Pricing

What Runs Where offers two different plans at $299 and $399 per month.

5. Spyfu ($33-$299)

When you’re managing an SEO and PPC ad campaign, Spyfu is a great resource to spy on your competitors. However, some people have reported inaccurate website traffic and budget data so be prepared to compare data with another tool.

Features

• Ad spend revealed. Search for your competitors/competitor research’ website to find out what they’re spending on PPC ads through Google Ads.
• Ad performance. Spyfu will tell you how many clicks your competitors are getting on their ads plus how many paid keywords they’re using.
• View competitor ads. View your competitors’ ads from the last 5 months.
• CPC estimates. The paid versions of Spyfu provides CPC estimates along with additional keyword stats.

Spyfu is one tool that provides free users with access to large amounts of data, so it’s definitely worth signing up to test out.

You can also search for competitors backlinks and export your data to custom reports. If you want a powerful competitor/competitor research analysis tool, Spyfu has you covered with a risk-free 30-day money back guarantee.

6. Serpstat ($55-$499+)

Serpstat is primarily an SEO platform with PPC competitor analysis feature’s.

Features

• Generate a list of competitors. Don’t know who your competitors are? Enter your website into Serpstat and you’ll get a list of your competitors.
• Keyword insights. On the back end, the system figures out which keywords you share with your competitors, which keywords they’re using that aren’t present on your website, and how many keywords your competitors are bidding on through PPC ads.
• View competitors’ ads. Serpstat will show you past ads run by your competitors on PPC platforms.

There’s a free browser-based version of Serpstat, but the features are limited. You’ll need a paid account to get significant, usable insights.

7. iSpionage ($50+)

iSpionage is one of the more affordable paid PPC competitor analysis tools and it also happens to provide some of the most advanced insights. This is a great tool for learning what works and following the examples set by successful competitors.

Features

• Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). Identify the most effective and profitable keywords in your niche.
• Ad Effectiveness Index (AEI). Identify your competitors’ most profitable ads.
• Analyze data from three search engines. iSpionage pulls data from Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
• See your competitors’ monthly budgets. In addition to seeing how much your competitors are spending on PPC ads, you’ll also get access to their overall strategy.
• Additional SEO analysis features. As a bonus, you can also identify your competitors’ top SEO keywords so you can make sure you’re covering all the right keywords.

Overall, iSpionage is a great tool for anyone running a PPC marketing campaigns.

8. KeywordSpy (free to try)

KeywordSpy offers several PPC competitor analysis feature’s that pull real-time data. Some top brands use KeywordSpy, including Toyota, IBM, and American Express.

Features

• Keyword identification. Identify competitors’ keywords and domain names used in their PPC ads.
• View ad copy. See what your competitors are writing for their headlines and ads (content strategy).
• View competitors’ ad spend. Find out how much money your competitors are spending on their ads.

The free trial will allow you to track a maximum of ten keywords, ads, and domains/competitor’s domain from your competitors.

PPC competitor analysis tools are extremely helpful

Ultimately, PPC competitive analysis tool will help you spy on your competitors & increase your CTR, reduce your CPC, identify keyword gaps, and ensure you’re targeting all the right keywords for your industry.

If you haven’t started analyzing your competition, sign up for some free trials with the competitor analysis tool listed in this article and take them for a test run. When you find the competitor analysis tools that fit your needs, upgrade to a paid version.

Need help with your PPC ad campaign? We can help!

How is your PPC ad strategy working out? If you’re getting less-than desirable results, our PPC ad services can help.

Running PPC ads isn’t easy. In fact, it takes time and commitment to learn all the ins and outs of pay-per-click advertising. Although some self-taught marketers can run a decently successful campaign, achieving outstanding results is a job best suited for professionals.

There are many complex PPC ad strategies you can’t learn over the weekend, like dayparting, for example. Also, each PPC platform requires a slightly different approach on the technical side.

If your ad campaign is struggling, reach out to our team of ad specialists – we’d love to help you get the clicks and conversions you deserve.

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Samuel Edwards

Chief Marketing Officer at PPC Agency

In his 9+ years as a digital marketer, Sam has worked with countless small businesses and enterprise Fortune 500 companies and organizations including NASDAQ OMX, eBay, Duncan Hines, Drew Barrymore, Washington, DC based law firm Price Benowitz LLP and human rights organization Amnesty International.

He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize search engine marketing (SEM) ROI. Connect with Sam on Linkedin.

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