Pay-per-click campaigns can assist in increasing brand recognition, providing leads, and increasing traffic. Yet, PPC marketing is not always easy to get properly, especially with so many businesses vying for the same audience.
Because of this, competitive analysis is crucial. Understanding the strategies employed by your rivals’ Google AdWords campaigns will assist you in better compete with them.
Effective PPC competitive analysis requires the following six important steps:
- Determine your rivals
- Examine their PPC approach.
- Examine their landing sites and ad copy
- Determine who their target market is.
- Examine their spending on both the budget and advertising
- Look at their ROI and performance
So let’s examine how to conduct a PPC competitive analysis.
Step-1 Determine Your rivals
The first step in any competitive study is to identify your rivals.
Do not skip this stage even if your business is well-established and you have extensive knowledge of your rivals. There are constantly new businesses entering an industry or growing that could now be competitors.
Utilize internal resources to find rivals (your sales and marketing staff will be aware of who is out there), but there are also some excellent tools available to assist.
You may undertake ad research with SEMRush, and Google AdWords Auction Insights (see below) makes it easy to compare the effectiveness of your campaigns, bid strategies, and ads to those of your rivals.
Step-2 Examine their PPC Approach
You can evaluate their PPC strategy if you are aware of your competitors. To cover both organic and paid channels, you need to consider how advertisers integrate SEO and PPC campaigns. Here are some practical methods for doing it.
keyword analysis
It should be simple to determine which keywords your competitors rank for if you’ve already performed a competitive study for SEO.
However, it’s worth conducting the same practice for PPC as there may be terms or phrases you could lose out on for paid advertising.
See which keywords your rivals are bidding on by using tools like SEMRush’s Keyword Gap tool.
To assess a keyword’s cost-effectiveness, it is important to consider its volume and CPC. This will assist you in locating possible gaps.
Advertising Analysis
See where the advertisements of your rivals are appearing. Are they most frequently found on search engine results pages (SERPs), particular websites, or social media platforms like YouTube?
Evaluate this data to locate possible ad placements, and be open to trying different things to determine how well your content performs. Use Similarweb to accomplish this.
keep track of their search results
To learn more about your competitors’ search engine positioning, the ad copy they employed, and their ad expenditure, use paid or free tools like those we’ve already described. This will assist in guiding your ad wording and bidding strategy.
Employ tools for ad intelligence
You can view the past results of your competitors’ advertising campaigns with ad intelligence solutions like Spyfu. Their ad spending, click-through rates, and conversion rates are all included in this.
Step-3 Examine their landing sites and ad copy
To increase engagement and conversion, content is crucial. If you’re not adapting ad copy or landing page content to the interests and demands of your audience, then they’re not going to click or stay around for long.
Review of the Ad Copy
Looking at what your competitors are doing can be a terrific strategy to assist you to enhance copy performance. What are they promoting as their unique selling qualities and how are they marketing their goods or services?
To begin, ponder the following:
- Are certain keywords being used in the ad copy?
- What is the content’s or the approach’s tone, such as formal, cordial, or humorous?
- What visual or video materials are they employing to encourage clicks?
- What kinds of CTAs are being used?
- Are their brand colors employed in their advertisements?
Analyzing Landing Pages
Your conversion rate will increase dramatically with a strong landing page. The material must be carefully organized, connect to your target audience, and have a compelling call to action to encourage click-through.
Also, you ought to confirm that the copy on your landing page corresponds with their place of origin. Does the landing page, for instance, reflect what a visitor anticipated reading about, after clicking on a Facebook ad, for example? Does it match the Facebook ad’s messaging and aesthetic?
Your competitors’ best-performing landing pages can be found using Google’s auction report. Make a list, then look at it. What’s effective, and why? What could you improve upon or get ideas from?
Consider conversion rate optimization at this point to maximize the likelihood that prospects will become leads or customers.
Step-4 Determine who their target market is
It will be easier for you to determine whether your PPC targeting is effective or if there are any buyer personas you are overlooking if you are aware of the target market of your competitors.
Time to start your research. Take a look at the people who your rivals’ PPC campaigns are aiming at. What media outlets do they employ? What positions or degrees of seniority are they looking for if the transaction is B2B? Does a certain age range or gender profile for B2C products?
Target audiences can be found using tools like SimilarWeb, AHREFs, or Google AdWords Keyword Planner.
Step-5 Examine their spending on both the budget and advertising
Get the most out of your PPC ads as keyword bidding becomes more challenging and marketing budgets become more constrained.
See what their budgets are and when they are distributing their funds and resources by looking at your competitors. This is possible by:
- Evaluate search engine ranks using ad intelligence technologies (like Spyfu or AdGooroo, for example).
- Track the frequency with which competition advertising appears and examine their internet presence, including social media
- Make connections with business leaders and gain knowledge about spending plans.
These strategies will assist you in better understanding your sector and identifying the audience engagement strategies that your rivals are employing.
Step-6 Look at their ROI and performance
Understanding the effectiveness and return on investment of your rivals’ PPC campaigns is crucial.
Analyzing industries or industry norms is the best approach to accomplish this. You can define Goals for your campaigns that are realistic and doable by using this Wordstream example from 2022 on Google and Microsoft advertisements.
Average positions, cost per click, cost per lead, CTR, impression share, cost per acquisition, and conversion rate are metrics you should comprehend and monitor.
It may take some time to perfect your PPC campaigns, so be prepared to evaluate, modify, and test.
