Ultimately, to succeed at Google Ads, you must gain an in-depth knowledge of your competitors. Understanding them reveals invaluable insights and provides opportunities for digital dominance.
Keyword research
In the highly competitive world of paid digital marketing, keeping an eye on competitors is vital. By employing appropriate tools and techniques in your competitor analysis process, valuable insights may emerge, and opportunities may present themselves, leading to improved results. From using Augmentum Google Ads competitor analysis to third-party tools – there are multiple methods of examining competitors.
Start by identifying competitors and their online presence. It will allow you to target relevant keywords, optimise your website for organic search, and provide insight into other keywords you hadn’t considered previously. Furthermore, studying their organic and paid search results could reveal opportunities to improve your rankings.
Make sure to monitor your competitors’ bids and ad positions on Google Auction System so you can gain a deeper insight into their strategies, which will give you an edge and speed up achieving PPC goals more rapidly. Use an additional third-party competitor tool such as SpyFu for this task to gain an even deeper insight into their campaigns and ad strategies.
Auction Insights
Each time someone searches on Google, an auction occurs in the background to decide which ads will appear and in what position on search results pages. Auction Insights allows advertisers to see how often their ads rank higher than competitors’ ads and any instances when top-of-page placement was missed; this data can help inform bid strategies and improve campaign performance.
Advertisers can view auction insights at the campaign, ad group and keyword levels. Augmentum Google Ads competitor analysis and keyword levels provide generalised insights, while campaign-level analysis offers more in-depth data on auction activity across your account. The Auction Insights report can be found under “Statistics” within Ads Manager.
The Auction Insights report provides insight into your ad’s performance against competitors for each keyword you target and can give an understanding of how other advertisers bid and position their ads, helping to improve ad ranking. Tracking auction insights regularly ensures you remain current with competition shifts or sudden shifts.
Auction insights are also invaluable for tracking how ad rankings differ depending on the device. It allows you to see whether competitors adopt mobile-first strategies and adapt your bidding strategy accordingly.
Organic research
As a PPC manager, you must understand your clients’ competition to ensure their campaigns are effective and reach their intended audiences. Utilise in-house knowledge or third-party tools in evaluating competitors’ strategies and identify strengths and weaknesses among them.
Google Ads auction system prioritises ads based on relevance and quality, making competitor keyword and ad copy research essential to succeeding. In helping with this endeavour, several competitive analysis tools such as Auction Insights can be leveraged; go into any campaign or ad group level within Google Ads to access this report.
Auction Insights gives insight into your competitors’ ad performance metrics, such as impression share, top-of-page rate and overlap rate. By studying their strategies, you can increase their advertising performance and gain an edge over them in competition.
Third-party tools
To successfully compete in Google Ads, gaining an in-depth knowledge of competitors’ paid search strategies is necessary. Third-party tools can be utilised to gain insight into competitors’ bidding strategies, ad positions and copy. As a result of your analysis of this data, the results can help improve your campaigns by identifying gaps in the market; refining messaging; optimising bidding/targeting parameters and finding gaps.
SEMrush, SpyFu and Ahrefs provide tools that make Google Ads analysis simpler by helping you discover competitors and their ads; track changes over time, analyse ad positions, identify keywords your competitors are bidding on; understand performance metrics of those ads, as well as discovering competitors themselves and their ad copies.