Should you be searching for your competitor’s PPC pages?

In the business world, competition is a necessary evil. You risk running out of luck very fast if you do not monitor what your competitors are doing. For this reason, a successful PPC campaign must include competitor analysis as an essential aspect. You may improve the effectiveness of your campaign and steer clear of expensive mistakes by being aware of your competitors’ tactics. This article will guide you in analyzing competitor pages and determining what is effective and unproductive for your niche.

The goal of analyzing your competitor’s PPC pages

When you examine your competitor’s pages, you search for hints regarding what is and is not effective for you. You may need to utilize the exact keywords or phrases that they are, or their call to action is stronger than yours. You can check to see if conversions, CTR, or any other performance statistic is correlated with using a different tech stack. But, by learning what makes them effective, you can modify your approach to compete more effectively.

The above is crucial if you and your competitors provide similar products or services. For instance, you may need a compelling call to action (CTA) if you manage a physical bank’s PPC campaign to divert potential leads from more contemporary online banks. You can get ideas by observing the strategies employed by your most significant competitors.

Also, page analysis can assist you in identifying areas that your competitors need to improve. Perhaps their material is hard to read, or their pages are disorganized. Maybe they may have a weird color scheme or don’t use any photos on their pages. By recognizing these flaws, you may concentrate your efforts and raise your conversion rates.

There are a lot of factors to take into account while examining the pages of your competitors. Even some seasoned PPC marketers may find this task overwhelming at times. For this reason, the seven practical and actionable suggestions that follow will assist you in maintaining your concentration on what matters most.

Don’t only copy your competitors.

The first thing you should know about competition landing pages is to resist the urge to replicate them immediately. However, it should go without saying that taking shortcuts rarely results in long-term benefits. There is, however, more justification for not trying to copy others. In the long term, duplicating a method verbatim won’t let you stand apart from the competition, even though it might initially help you perform better.

Note that one of the secrets to effective marketing in general, and PPC marketing precisely, is setting yourself out of competitors. The goal is to absorb knowledge from competitors, steer clear of their errors, and devise strategies to enhance their strengths. Consider how you could improve anything that catches your eye on their landing pages. When conducting page analysis or any other type of competition study, you should approach the task with that mindset.

Use the auction report feature in Google Ads to compile a list of competitors and their landing pages.

One excellent tool for rapidly gaining an overview of your competitors’ landing pages is the Google AdWords Auction report. The landing page URLs and the ads that compete against each of your keywords are displayed in this report. This report is beneficial when conducting a preliminary analysis, and I especially want to understand what your competitors are doing. It helps find new competitors that you might not have known about previously. Take the following steps to gain access to the report:

Open your Google Ads account and log in.
Select the ad keyword, ad group, or active ad campaign of the competitor you want to find.
Select the tab labeled “Auction Insight.”
Analyze the results.

Using the knowledge in this report, you can:

Look at competitors’ domains to find out if they target the exact keywords with their ads as you do.
Examine the position that your ad is often displayed on.
Check the frequency at which your ads appear compared to your competitors.

Utilize Facebook’s page transparency feature.

Facebook responded to Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election by introducing the Page Transparency tool. The intention was to provide voters with additional information by displaying how much money political parties and individual candidates spend on Facebook advertisements. As a result, it’s an excellent tool for seeing how much money your rivals spend on Facebook advertisements and how engaged their audience is.

The best part is how simple it is to obtain this data because it is all in your competitor’s ad library. All you need to do to get there is:

Open your Facebook account and log in.
Go to your competitor’s Facebook Business page.
Select “See All” under the “Page Transparency” tab.
To determine if the page has advertisements, scroll down to the “Ads from this Page” portion of the pop-up.
Click the “Go To Ad Library” button.

Once inside the Ad Library, you can discover a wealth of helpful information, such as:

Every Facebook advertisement that a business posts on its Facebook business page;
The duration of each campaign they have been running;
The advertisement’s copy and description, etc.

Use a spying tool to view competing landing pages instead of clicking on their ads.

Avoiding clicking on your competitors’ advertisements’ call to action (CTA) is an important tip to remember. The reason is straightforward: you don’t want to click on your competitor’s ad whenever you wish to view their landing page, even though the effect might not be significant if it receives a lot of traffic. Although it might occasionally be challenging to locate the landing page URL without clicking on it, you can get around this problem by using various paid tools. iSpionage is one example, but plenty are out there, and they will be discussed below.

Recognize what you are looking for in your competitor’s PPC pages.

By analyzing the performance of your competitors’ pages, you may be able to improve your own based on their expertise. Among the crucial details to search for are:

Which source is the traffic going to their page? Does it originate from social media, ad campaigns, SEO ranking, etc.?
What content does their page display? Examine each landing page to find details such as the style and type of design used. What colors are more prominent in your eyes? What role do those colors have in the brand? Would your landing page look good with a similar color scheme?
See what their primary offer is as well. Is there anything better that you can provide? If they already offer guarantees, could you provide more?
Examine the page’s performance. You should investigate any performance measures, such as the number of page views, bounce rate, and CTR, that can help you determine how successful your competitors’ landing pages are.
Examine the technological stack that they employed. It would help if you thought about studying this additional aspect of competitors. Suppose you compare what your competitors utilize with DoubleClick.Net, Adsense, or Facebook Custom Audiences. In that case, you can determine what aspects of their marketing strategy work better than yours.
The multimedia technologies they use and the content management system (CMS) they employ are also important to pages. To determine whether you’re lagging in modern technology like cryptocurrency, you may even find out what payment options they accept from their clients.

Although all of this may seem like difficult-to-find information, tools like BuiltWith will take care of it for you, saving you time.

Find out and evaluate A/B testing.

If you have a comprehensive list of all the advertising and landing pages your competitors have used, you can simply learn from the outcomes of their A/B tests on landing sites and ad wording. This might save a ton of time for your PPC advertising campaigns. For instance, assume you create a landing page for a specific keyword. After researching, you discover a competitor has previously conducted A/B testing on landing pages using the same keyword.

Once you have followed the preceding suggestion on both landing sites, you can analyze which worked best for them and use the information to create your landing page.

Take a close look at your competitor’s strategies for remarketing.

Knowing how competitors remarket can help you improve your retention and repeat business strategy. Keep an eye on their:

Remarketing list construction
Ad sequencing
Retargeting messaging and ad content
Using site-wide tagging to create personalized audiences

Learning from their successes and failures can improve your remarketing plan and marketing approach.

Essential tools for competitors PPC page analysis

To perform a comprehensive competitor analysis, it is necessary to utilize strong tools that gather information and offer useful insights. The following offer great services:

1. SEMrush

Keywords, ad wording, budgets, and other details about competitors’ PPC campaigns are all readily available on SEMrush. This makes benchmarking and spotting new opportunities simple. SEMRush is one of the few 360-degree marketing systems that allows you to create digital marketing strategies, research competitors’ advertising tactics, and determine how much money they are spending on marketing, even though it takes a lot of effort to become proficient.

Using comprehensive information on sponsored keywords, PPC competitiveness, and keyword research for every domain, you will find robust data to make informed decisions on your campaigns.

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs offers comprehensive PPC statistics on competitor businesses’ keywords, display campaigns, and advertisements. This makes it possible to find profitable opportunities and outbid rivals. With petabytes of data stored in its Singapore data center, Ahrefs is a top source of big data for SEO. It introduced its initial PPC marketing tools a few years ago and continues to advance every day.

However, it may not have enough information for niche keywords and is still not focused on PPC competitor analysis.

3. SpyFu

You can view the ads, keywords, and expenditure amounts of your competitors’ PPC campaigns using SpyFu’s comprehensive analytics. This aids in finding chances to outbid competitors on desirable keywords and possibly connect with more niche searchers. Even with the less expensive plans, it’s reasonably priced and offers infinite searches. But if competitors aren’t investing enough in search advertising for their efforts to be monitored, SpyFu’s data may be lacking.

In addition, SpyFu does not integrate with other marketing tools; therefore, the data must be exported manually.

4. Google Ads’ Auction Insights

The Auction Insights feature of Google Ads offers helpful insight into the real bids and impressions of competitors’ PPC on common keywords. This aids budget planning by revealing the lowest bids required to attract more customers. However, campaigns running on Microsoft Ads or other networks are not displayed in Auction Insights; instead, the data is limited to competitors who also use Google Ads.

Furthermore, the specific advertisements and landing pages hidden beneath competitor bids are anonymous, reducing campaign visibility overall. Even though the actual bid information from shared auctions is essential, relying too much on Auction information could cause you to miss competitors’ innovative messaging and larger non-Google activities.

5. Facebook Ad Library

Facebook Ad Library makes viewing the real Facebook advertising of competitors’ PPC possible, offering insights into their inventive messaging and innovative approaches. Exposing what appeals to target audiences aids in improving ad distinction. Facebook Ad Library does not display advertisements from competitors on other platforms; it only shows ads running on Facebook.

Also, campaign transparency is limited because data like budgets, bids, impressions, and targeting are anonymous.

Finding your competitor’s PPC pages

Businesses obtain a crucial competitive advantage that directs their own PPC success by carefully examining their competition’s sponsored search strategies. Although this can be a rigorous task, it is made easier with the aid of PPC analysis tools.

FAQs

How do I conduct a competitive PPC analysis?

Here are 6 useful steps to conduct a competitive PPC analysis

Determine who your competitors are.
Examine their PPC approach.
Examine their landing pages and ad copy.
Identify who their target audience is.
Examine their ad spend and budget.
Examine their ROI and performance.

How to Find Competitor’s PPC Pages