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.
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.
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.
To help you start analyzing your competitors, we’ve created a list of the top 8 PPC best website competitor analysis tools.
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
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.
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:
Google’s Action Insights is free and comes with your Google Ads account to spy on your competitors.
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
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
Serpstat is primarily an SEO platform with PPC competitor analysis feature’s.
Features
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.
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
Overall, iSpionage is a great tool for anyone running a PPC marketing campaigns.
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
The free trial will allow you to track a maximum of ten keywords, ads, and domains/competitor’s domain from your competitors.
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.
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.
Businesses can do one of many things to optimize their PPC ad campaigns and improve profitability.
However, if you just started a business, these strategies may seem a little daunting initially.
Ad groups either contain a single ad or several ads that target specific keywords. Then, you set a certain price for those ads every time your ad group’s keywords trigger it to appear in front of your audience.
The best part about this strategy is setting your price for individual keywords within an ad group. You can also customize your ad group according to a specific theme.
For example, you can personalize them according to your brand’s persona or the types of products and services you offer.
Before jumping into how you can optimize your ad groups for better reach, it is essential to understand what ad groups are.
Ad groups are sets of keywords that businesses use in their targeted campaigns: every single ad or a group of ads shares similar targets.
You will be required to set a specific price or bid that will be used when the keywords cause an ad to appear to your audience.
These bids are called CPC ( Cost Per Click) bids. The advertising service usually sets these keywords for your PPC marketing campaigns.
When creating an account and setting up details, you will be asked to generate an ad group that will store text ads, landing pages, and keywords.
This will allow you to create an organized structure for your PPC ads. This can be very helpful when you monitor your progress and make specific changes to your PPC Ad campaigns.
For example, if you make a unique ad group for all the products and services your business offers, you might make an ad group for products you offer to your commercial clients and a different one for your residential ones.
Long story short, you can effortlessly structure your promotional materials through tools provided by PPC advertising agencies and services.
Every PPC advertising campaign you create lets you have multiple ad groups. Every ad group must contain at least one ad and one keyword. You can perfectly run a PPC ad with one ad group, one campaign, and one keyword. Moreover, you can also use one campaign and one ad group to market multiple keywords.
The question most business owners ask themselves is, “what is the benefit of running an ad group for PPC ad campaigns?”
To understand these benefits, it is crucial to look at the features shared between several ad groups and the parts that can be set separately for each one.
Let’s use an example to explain the benefits of ad groups better. Think of owning a restaurant that serves different types of cuisines from all over the world.
Having several ad groups for your PPC campaigns allows you to generate ads close to a specific group of keywords.
You can also fragment your keywords into different lists that are much more related. However, each ad group must ideally have one specific keyword and numerous variations.
For example, you can have separate ad groups for “Sushi rolls” or “Pepperoni Pizza.” In addition, you can create an ad campaign for a specific keyword and include several keywords such as “Cheese Pepperoni Pizza” or “Sushi Rice Rolls.”
Targetting long-tailed keywords drives better conversations than using common keywords. However, it would help if you still made sure that the ads are compelling enough so that users can click and improve conversion rates.
You can do this by creating different ad groups for long-tailed keywords. For example, you can create long-tailed keywords like “Which sushi roll flavor should I try.”
This will give you a chance to specifically target a user who wants to try different flavors of sushi rolls. You can also create a landing page and ads that compare different flavors of sushi roll sauces.
It’s not like you can set up a campaign, and it will keep running for life. You will need to tweak your keywords constantly.
For example, delete the old ones you don’t need and add new ones. You can also generate new ad groups for your new keywords without disrupting the old ones.
You can easily optimize your ads by creating new ad groups for the keywords. Moreover, you will also optimize your landing pages without worrying about harming other keywords.
The changes in your ad groups can significantly impact your overall campaign budget. However, you can also preset specific funding for all ad groups without worrying it will exceed.
Then, when there is a peak in queries related to one ad group, it will automatically absorb the price from other ad groups.
This strategy can be beneficial if you own a small business since startup businesses usually work within a limited budget.
Now that you are aware of the importance of ad groups in PPC let’s look at ways you can create better ad groups for your PPC campaigns.
It is essential to get all the tactical elements right to ensure functional structure. This will help you quickly benefit from the most innovative paid search methods that rely on automation and scripts.
For example, when you decide the number of ad groups you need, you must consider what type of searches need to be covered the most.
Your audience plays a crucial role in your ad group structure. You can use bid modifiers to avoid creating separate campaigns.
Moreover, it is vital to identify your audience’s specific needs and preferences. It will help you understand the niche of your business and help you come up with new product ideas according to the requirements of your customers.
In addition, identifying a specific need will help you communicate with your audience effectively while improving engagement rates.
Moreover, you must use any first-party and third-party data that helps you guide your structure. You can also target old customers using RLSA campaigns.
However, you must slice your structure a little bit further, mainly if you sell several products and services.
For example, you can create separate ad campaigns for users who have purchased specific products from you. This will help you support cross-selling business objectives that have specific dedicated goals.
You may want a similar geography footprint for your business, just like it does with any other channel.
However, the demands of your search engine will likely be different from the location of your offline sales.
So, take your time and search where most of your online and offline sales occur—for example, the cities, states, countries, areas, etc.
Once you do this, you can set up individual campaigns for your top markets. Then, if you still have some of the budget remaining, you can create a campaign that covers all the remaining audience in places your consumers usually come from.
When deciding a specific language to target, you need to see where most of your bulk audience is coming from. If you want to target several languages, you can create separate campaigns for each language.
Every device’s performance dramatically varies. Therefore, before optimizing your campaigns in relation to a specific device, you must consider some of the advantages and disadvantages listed below.
The mobile user experience will be vital if the site has a responsive design. Your campaign can have the same goals as those generated on other devices.
Moreover, segmenting your campaign according to the devices will reduce the KPI and traffic available for optimization. This may create campaigns that do not have much volume.
It is recommended that you do not generate campaigns concerning a device if it does not present a solid amount of cost, traffic, and goals.
Instead, you can use device bid modifiers to efficiently tailor the ad message across several devices.
Using keywords is extremely important in any PPC ad campaign. While Google does provide you with good quality keywords according to the relevance of your campaign, it is highly crucial to integrate keywords that have a higher CTR.
Studies have shown that 68% of online searches begin with a Search engine through keywords. So, when you make an ad group, make sure to check the performance of your keywords before integrating them.
And if your audience belongs to a different geographical location, finding keywords relevant to that specific location may be challenging. In such cases, you must use a VPN to discover what keywords rank in that location.
With a VPN, you will acquire an IP address of a particular area. This will help you navigate through the internet just like a local would.
Although several VPN options are available, some of them might not be up to the mark in terms of quality.
Therefore, you need to make a wise decision regarding the VPN you choose to surf through the internet in that particular location. Check online reviews before investing in a VPN service.
Using ad extensions is one of the best ways to unravel information regarding your products and services. Generally, there are two kinds of ad extensions.
Advertisers use manual ad extensions according to the requirements of their business. Therefore, you can easily customize and personalize manual ad extensions.
Moreover, these extensions further segment into several other extensions like location, call out, site link, review, etc.
On the contrary, automatic ad extensions function automatically. Furthermore, automatic ad extensions are also segmented into several other attachments such as previous visits, dynamic site links, customer ratings, etc.
It is common for ads to have a high bounce rate in pay-per-click marketing. For example, you might have specific customers who purchase products from you and then sway away.
Advertisers use remarketing through blogs, articles, and websites to regain those customers. In addition, advertisers can generate custom messages that lure visitors to revisit your website and purchase a product or service through remarketing.
It is essential t keep track of your PPC campaigns to ensure the success of your ad groups. Unfortunately, some marketers don’t realize the importance of keeping track of their PPC campaigns. This is one of the reasons why their PPC campaigns are unsuccessful.
Make sure you constantly monitor the performance of your PPC campaigns, as it will help you gain significant insights into how well your PPC campaign is performing.
Google Analytics is an excellent tool for advertisers who use Google Ads to market their advertisements. Research has shown that Google Ads convert 50% better than organic reach.
Hence, if you use Google Ads to market your campaign, there are high chances your website will rank better if you optimize your ad groups.
You can invest in an automation tool to improve the efficiency of your ad groups. Automation tools offer closed-loop reporting to help you quickly find information regarding your campaigns.
It also allows you to use excellent marketing strategies to improve the performance of your campaigns.
PPC advertising can help you boost engagement and increase your website’s visibility irrespective of the type and size of your business. However, following the steps listed above is essential to ensure your campaign is working well.
Ad copies are a great way to ensure the success of your ad groups. Therefore, it is essential to write an ad copy that is convincing enough to retain old customers and attract newer ones.
In addition, make sure you state your business’s unique selling point so that your customers have a reason to choose you over your competition.
Moreover, make sure your ad copies are relevant. Link all your ads with relevant keywords and landing pages.
Furthermore, make sure you generate eye-catching headlines since these are the first thing a visitor looks at.
Use power words in your headlines to make them even more compelling. For example, you can use words like Free, Today Only, Exclusive, Instant Etc. Finally, end your ad copies with an eye-grabbing call to action.
Every marketer seeks ad groups that are compelling and cost less at the same time. Therefore, consistency in an ad group is critical.
In addition, your landing pages must directly speak to an audience searching for something to reach your website. Therefore, make sure you consistently create ad texts, landing pages, and keyword groups closely related.
When you create well-aligned ad groups, not only do you pay less, and convert more.
For example, suppose a user searches for graphic designing services, and your ad talks about it and sends them to a similar landing page. In that scenario, you will get more conversions than a landing page that does not associate graphic designing services.
So, long story short, you need to be very vigilant in what you include in your ad copies as they play a huge role in determining how successful your ads will be.
Running Facebook Ads is among the most successful strategies when growing your brand, generating sales and leads, and establishing loyal consumers.
However, for marketers, Facebook Ads are even more critical. This is related to the size of the audience, targeting possibilities, social network attention, and a decrease in organic reach.
It’s reasonable to think that you have a few rivals among the ten million-plus Facebook advertisers. When it comes to competition, you should preferably be aware of their assets and how successfully they are doing it. The same is true if you’re running ads on Facebook.
You may boost the effectiveness of your Facebook Ad campaign by identifying the fans of your competitors’ pages. However, there is one distinguishing feature of your competitors’ consumers that you may use.
Remember, your opponent’s audience represents a set of consumers that are already poised to purchase what you have to offer.
Therefore, as a marketer, you simply cannot afford to squander this valuable real estate. Hence, you need to know how to tailor your Facebook advertising to your rivals’ audience.
A brand is set apart by the additional value it offers. And this is established through different marketing and promotion campaigns.
Not only are inventive ideas needed in the marketing business, but one also needs to monitor their rivals’ advertising efforts, targeting their consumers.
Here is how you target Facebook ads to the competitor’s audience:
Lookalike audiences are a powerful tool on Facebook that may assist you in obtaining an audience similar to that of another business.
Install Facebook pixels on your website and establish a Custom audience for the most remarkable ad results. These audiences share certain qualities – Facebook will look for people who have these characteristics.
Using a Lookalike audience to reach audiences of a rival is a successful strategy. This is because your items are so similar; there is a lot of overlap in your targeted traffic. Therefore, adopt the same traits as your competition and fans. For example, you may find rivals’ Facebook Page fans using the Lookalike audience technique.
Lookalike audiences that target Facebook advertising to rivals’ sites do not appear overnight. Targeting the correct audience and analyzing the precise characteristics of competitors’ Facebook followers takes time.
Therefore, you should examine the advertising audiences of marketers to develop the most accurate bespoke audience.
You cannot directly target the followers of your rivals’ pages on Facebook – there isn’t a button for that! However, Facebook Ads make approaching people with common interests more accessible as well as huge competitors.
Therefore, you can give more value to your advertisements once you’ve researched the material that connects with the audience you’re trying to target.
All you have to do is go to the “Interests” area and enter the name of the competing fan page.
For example, suppose you’re producing advertisements for a local bakery business. In that case, you may target visitors in the region who “like” or have expressed interest in pages linked to top local bakery companies.
But unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all method for reaching your competition through interest-based audiences.
However, by assessing client interests, you will profit from a highly targeted audience. You may then use the information on shared interests to develop bespoke audiences. These will help you target individuals with interests likely to coincide with your contenders and your business.
Getting the focus of your rivals’ audience is less about deliberately targeting relevant page fans and more about aligning to their interests and characteristics.
This enables you to send more relevant messages by improving your Facebook Ad targeting possibilities. Additionally, customizing your Facebook. However, to prevent wasting advertising expenditures on possibly rigid consumers, this method must be implemented correctly.
As a result, hiring a qualified advertising firm with the ability, tools, and knowledge to manage such parts of your PPC campaigns is recommended.
Compile a list of particular competitor pages that you wish to target. These pages can be found using a variety of methods. As you conduct your investigation, make a note of the page titles and URLs.
With that said, these are the best ways to locate relevant competitor pages:
Please make a list of all of your top competitors and find their Facebook pages. For example, you can locate the corporate Facebook pages or the founders’ pages.
Fill the Facebook search box with relevant terms and then choose the desired pages. You can go through this list for more sites relating to your profession.
Consider your sector’s brands and public figures as an excellent tactic. Locate and add their Facebook pages to your list.
If you’ve liked a page relating to your sector, they must be doing something well. So it may be helpful to examine your own Facebook profile and make a list of the relevant pages you have liked in the past.
You may access your likes by appending ‘/likes’ to the end of your Facebook profile URL.
When you click on the Community tab on any Facebook page, you will find a list of top fans.
Navigate to their profiles and add ‘/likes’ at the end of the URL.
Now you’ll be able to look at other pages that they’ve liked.
Go to a Facebook page that is relevant to your industry. Then, in the sidebar, look for ‘Related Pages’ or ‘Pages Liked by This Page.’ These alternatives allow you to delve down the rabbit hole and uncover competition pages you may not have considered otherwise.
Add interests that are important to your business to Facebook Audience Insights. Then, click the ‘Page Likes’ tab to get a list of pages liked by individuals with those interests.
To signify significance, Facebook arranges this list by affinity score. Pay special attention to sites with a high-affinity score.
Enter your search terms into YouTube to check who has the highest-ranking videos. Look out for their Facebook sites as well. They most likely have a valid, high-quality audience you can address.
When you go straight on your competitor’s Facebook page from the Audience Insights dashboard, you’ll get many content ideas and research data. Examine your rivals’ pages and take notice of the user involvement and the content as well.
Examine the left side of your rival’s Facebook profile. You will notice direct connections to their material categorized as:
Connect each of these links and dive deeper to see what kind of engagement they are receiving.
Once you’ve determined if their engagement is favorable or harmful, you may devise strategies to adjust your Facebook Ad approach accordingly. Here are some critical questions to assist you:
Examine how relevant platforms and your rivals engage their audiences in ways that progress them along the sales funnel. You may use this information to create your audience targeting techniques that will take visitors away from your competitors.
This strategy is quite successful since you effectively retarget an already engaged Facebook audience with material they have already expressed an interest in. To pique the interest of these followers, you may add your own distinctive and personal touch.
Split testing your target audiences helps you determine which ones produce the most remarkable outcomes for your ad campaigns. Since you’ve gathered important information about your competitors’ audiences and their likes (based on data from your page list), the Facebook split test audience factor is an excellent tool for precise targeting.
This tool separates your audience into random, non-overlapping groups and enables you to collect statistically meaningful data. You can have up to five versions of your test variable in the Facebook split test. Facebook computes and compares the price per result for every ad-set.
And then, the ad-set with the lowest possible cost per outcome (cost per video view) prevails. Next, Facebook uses test data and hundreds of simulations to calculate the Confidence Level, which is displayed as a percentage. Thus, estimating your chances of having similar findings if you repeated the split test.
As a result, in this scenario, you may use an audience split test and a goal to discover which audience delivers the lowest cost per video view. The steps for building a split test campaign includes:
When your winning ad set is discovered, Facebook will stop the test. You can now apply the split test to your whole sales funnel and pit your rivals’ audiences against one another to see where your subsequent efforts should go.
Targeting competitors in Facebook is not as clear-cut as it is in Microsoft Ads and Google Ads. Despite that, it can still be a worthwhile strategy to examine.
The point to keep in mind is to be careful with what you type in as your target and observe any performance to judge whether it can work for you or not.
01Digital marketing and PPC companies use advanced marketing techniques to reach online audiences, and one of the most important is PPC or pay per click.
Below are some of the most frequent questions we hear about PPC.
There are several reasons you may not see your PPC ads when you search Google:
You may be seeing remarketing ads which many digital marketing companies recommend.
Remarketing takes effect by using a cookie when searchers to go your site. The cookie lets your campaign target them as they look at other websites on Google’s network.
You should try this as well because it can really drive up your conversions.
You probably have competition going after your keywords. Just as your team is doing keyword conversion optimization, your competitors are too, which boosts the price. Just one competitor being more aggressive can make the CPCs much higher.
Another issue that drives cost is quality score.
If you see a decrease in quality score, you may have higher costs per clock.
There are many variables that influence quality score, but some of the most vital is CTR, the relevance of the ad, and the relevance of the landing page.
You can help here by making sure all of them are being improved by your team.
Improving the metrics that affect quality score is one of the best ways to improve the effectiveness of your PPC ads.
There are some challenges when you start PPC, and the biggest is being good at it. First, you need to do a lot of work upfront to have a solid PPC campaign.
For example, you must do a great job researching and picking perfect keywords. Then you must organize your keywords into effective ad groups and campaigns. You also need to establish good landing pages that have been optimized to convert traffic and also programmed to defeat click fraud, which is when a person or bot clicks your ad to drain your budget.
When it’s done effectively, PPC is one of business’s most powerful marketing tools. But if you don’t do it right, it’s just throwing money down the toilet. Whether it is best for your company depends on what your objectives are.
For brand awareness, PPC can work great. No matter whether your ads work as far as ROI or not, if it gets impressions, more people know about your company.
For increased revenue, PPC can work well, but you need to have a high-quality website set up to convert your traffic to sales.
There are several ways you can optimize your PPC campaign depending on what your business does. For instance, the Google Shopping Network may be ideal for companies because it can have ad text and images. But if the company offers services, you may want expanded ad text.
If you find Google is doing well for you, it makes sense to advertise on Bing. You will get a lower volume of leads but the traffic may be more cost-effective than Google.
Your competitors know that searchers looking for your company could be customers for them, too. They’re trying to nab them. There isn’t anything you can do to stop this as it’s not illegal. This is another cost-effective way to get prospects that you may consider.
The quality score is how Google views how good your ads are compared to your landing pages and keywords. It’s important to have a high quality score because you get better positioning and lower CPC.
You can improve this score by making sure your text for the ad is relevant to your landing page and keywords. Also, look at the landing page and what the user experience is like. You also may add negative keywords that aren’t relevant to your business.
First, double-check that your conversion tracking has been set up correctly. It can be hard to get conversions when you first start your campaigns. But to make them happen, run tests all the time. Be sure every ad is relevant to your keyword and landing page. And use negative keywords, too.
Next, competitor analysis is vital for PPC and there are many tools that will help you do well with it. If you look in your Google Ads Interface, you can go over Auction Insights to find out the competitors you have for the identical keywords.
Doing well with PPC takes a lot of time, planning, and execution. But if you carefully select your keywords, negative keywords, and optimize your landing pages for conversions, you should be able to increase sales and brand awareness over the year.
If your Google Ads aren’t showing or if you are having issues with your PPC ROI, get in touch, we can help!
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