How To Do a PPC Competitive Analysis?

PPC (Pay Per Click) competitor analysis is a significant part of all successful digital marketing campaigns. When you consistently analyze the competition, you can effectively ensure that you target the right keywords, convey the client’s message, and avoid overspending on ads. 

In case the PPC ads do not perform as it was aimed for, it may be because of improper measuring of the competitor ads. You can show your value and expertise by rethinking your online marketing strategy and also giving these ads a much better boost. PPC competitive analysis is something that must be monitored very closely because otherwise, you can miss out on many opportunities when it comes to paid advertising.

In addition to ensuring that the PPC strategy is in line with the goals, it must also be ensured that the PPC competitor analysis is being monitored. You can stay proactive by noticing the ad copy and convincing users to click on the ads. Start by looking at what the competitors may be doing and find the direct or indirect competition by putting your clients in a better position for outranking the ad position. 

In order to make things simple, we will understand how to perform a PPC competitive analysis so that it ensures effective results. Keep reading to know more. 

What is a PPC Competitive Analysis?

Competitor analysis must be an integral part of the agency’s strategy. In case you wish to help your customers get ahead of their competition, you should be able to compare their strengths and weaknesses while determining their points of differences in the market. 

There are many reasons why a PPC competitive analysis is considered important. Let us have a look at them one by one. 

1. It shows what kind of keywords are being targeted and exactly what amount is being spent. By focusing on these factors, you can find the gaps in your customer’s PPC campaigns which then helps in saving money. 
2. When you do PPC competitive analysis, you can effectively adjust the marketing benchmarks and recognize more opportunities for improving your customer’s strategy. 
3. PPC competitive analysis also helps in revealing how to position a business and keep attention on factors such as new trends, changes, and ideas.
4. A PPC competitive analysis helps in gaining an edge by improving the ad copy and creative strategy. 

Competitive research tells you the story behind why your campaigns must perform the way they must because your competition can affect you. For instance, this process can offer insights into factors such as rising cost per acquisition, loss in impression share, etc.

In case you wish to scale your accounts and also keep them rising then it is important to monitor your competitors consistently. This allows you to monitor changes in the ever-changing digital marketing landscape. 

PPC is like a race in which you must never take your eyes off the road. With quality competitor research you can keep your attention on industry trends, changes in the competition, keywords, etc. It will also allow you to know more opportunities as they come on the scene and track how you rise up the rank. PPC helps in bidding against the auctions and not just businesses that are in the industry. 

Other than this, there are some measurable reasons why PPC competitive analysis can be helpful. 

1. Marketing Benchmarks: For all marketing channels, you are required to have an understanding of acceptable statistics that can show good results. However, if your competitors are achieving better results then it is time to rethink the marketing benchmarks completely.
2. Track Industry and Market Trends: Marketing trends keep changing every now and then and these trends affect the market to many different degrees. Hence, the impact of these trends can spile and decline in the coming years. By performing a competitor analysis, you can measure how the market is preparing for trends and adjust the strategies.
3. Optimise Ad Budget: While going with the new trends is important, you should also be mindful to not waste your money on old strategies. In case you keep an eye on the competitors, you will not waste money by testing the new pay-per-click strategies and learning from their experiences.
4. Updating Marketing Mix: The digital marketing strategy of your competitor will tell you almost everything that is to know about them and their ideas. Right from news, to product launches, events, and keywords, you can know everything. All of this information can be used for updating the marketing mix and directing the company’s development.
5. Revise Goals: With the online marketing landscape changing consistently, it may become important to adjust your strategy, marketing, and PPC goals.
6. Finding Gaps: At the fundamental of a successful marketing strategy, there is a simple idea of looking for a problem and then offering a solution that can fix it. This problem in the market might have great value for the business and could also be helpful in filling the gaps. These gaps can be high-value keywords or popular search terms that may not have wide competition. Finding these gaps in the PPC market requires you to understand what the competitors may be bringing at the front. 

Related Read: 8 Essential Things You Must Know Before Running PPC Ads

Steps to Perform a PPC Competitive Analysis

The pay-per-click activities can be helpful for boosting brand awareness, generating more leads, and driving more traffic. However, PPC marketing can be challenging to get right, particularly when there are so many competitors who are aiming for the same audience. 

Hence, competitive analysis is very important. It helps in understanding the methods used by competitors and learning more about Google Ad Strategies. 

1. Find Your Competitors

With the competitive analysis, the prime step is to know who your competitors are. Even when you are an established company with detailed information on your competition, you must not ignore this step. 

There are new organizations getting into an industry and expanding that can be counted as new competitors. You must use in-house knowledge for finding competitors as your sales and marketing teams will be aware of who is out there. However, if you are looking for some other ways to deal with this then are many tools that can help.

SEMRush is an excellent tool that helps in conducting ad research while Google Ads Auction Insights helps in measuring the ad, bidding strategy, and even the performance of the campaign that is being run against the competitors. 

2. See The PPC Strategy

After you know who you are competing against, it becomes possible to analyze the PPC strategy. You must also look at how advertisers combine their SEO and PPC strategies for covering organic and paid channels. There are many ways in which this can be done. 

• Keyword Search: In case you have already done a competitive analysis for SEO then it must be simple to know what keywords the competitors may be ranking for. It is worthwhile to do this exercise for PPC as there are terms that you can miss out on for paid advertising. You can use tools such as SEMRush to see which keywords the competitors may be bidding on. It can be worth looking at the volume and CPC for seeing how cost-friendly a keyword can be. It helps in finding potential gaps in the keyword strategy.
• Ad Placement Understanding: You should look at the ads of the competitors being displayed and understand if they are primarily appearing on the search engine result pages (SERPs), on websites, on social media channels, etc. Try to analyze this information for finding placements of ads and experimenting to see the performance of content.
• Search Results Analysis: You can use paid or free tools for getting a better idea of the competitor’s search engine ranking, the ad copy, and the ad budget. This helps in informing the bedding strategy and ad copy.
• Ad Intelligence Tools: You can use ad intelligence tools that can help in seeing the historical performance of the competitor’s ad campaigns. It includes the ad spend, click-through rate, and conversion rate. 

3. Optimise Ad Copy and Landing Pages

In case you are not customizing the ad copy to the interests of your audience then they are not likely to stay around for a long time. A good way to ensure this is by improving the copy performance and looking at what your competitors may be doing. 

See if your competitors are using specific keywords, tone of the content, imagery, video content, CTAs, and colours used in ads. Other than this, a good landing page can also do wonders for conversions. The content must be managed in a way that speaks to the audience with a powerful CTA and also drives click-through.

You must ensure that the landing page copy matches the point of origin. In case someone clicks on an ad, the landing page should match what the visitor thinks they can read. It should align with the messages and look of the ads. 

The Google auction report can help in finding competitors, making a list of them, and taking a deep look at what is working and what is not. You can also think about conversion rate optimization for turning prospects into leads and customers. 

4. Find the Target Audience of Your Competitors

You can understand the target audience of your competitors and help them see if you are on the right track with the PPC targeting or if there are buyer persons that you may be missing. 

Do some research and look at who your competitors are targeting with the PPC strategy, which channels are they using, etc. In case it is B2B, the job roles and levels of seniority must be seen, in case it is B2C, then the age and gender profile can be seen. You can use resources for finding the target audience such as Google Ads Keyword Planner, AHREFs, etc

5. Monitor Ad Budget

If it becomes difficult to bid for keywords, it becomes even more important to get the most from your PPC campaigns. You should take some time to understand what their budget is and where they are allocating their money and resources. This can be ad intelligence tools. 

You can analyze the search engine rankings, the competitor ads and how they look, online presence including social media, and budget spending. These are the tactics that can help you in understanding an industry and see what is working for your competitor in the engagement. 

6. Monitor the Performance and ROI

It is essential to really understand the performance and ROI of your competitors for monitoring the PPC activity. One of the best ways to make this happen is by analyzing industries and the standard benchmarks for your industry. 

The Wordstream on Google Ads helps in setting KPIs for the PPC campaigns that are more achievable and realistic. You must take some time to understand these metrics by tracking average positions, cost per click, cost per lead, cost per acquisition, conversion rate, etc.

Make sure that you understand that it takes a while to get the PPC campaign right so that you are willing to see, change, and even test for the long haul.

7. Domain Authority

The domain authority can be scored from 1 to 100 and is used by Google for finding organic rankings. If the domain authority is high, it is sure that the site rank will also be on the search engine result pages. 

For comparing the domain authority with competitors, you should know how authoritative your site is, the kind of links it has, and if the links are from a well-known authority. In case the competitor has a higher authority than the site, you will have a difficult time beating your competitor to competitive keywords.

8. Google Ad Quality Score

Google also pays attention to the quality of a website and the landing page when it comes to calculating the paid ad rank. This is done with the aim to send the users to just the right website. 

Quality score is something that can affect the tendency to place an ad message higher than the competition but also influences costs. If the site provides a good quality experience then Google can prefer ads over the competition even if the bid is somewhat lower.

Hence, if the competitors have good quality scores or domain authority then it can be difficult to place ads on the top of the page. In this case, the time and budget can be served better by focusing on long-form keywords with less competition. 

Related Read: Why Invest in PPC Advertising for Business Growth

Conclusion

The fundamental purpose of running a PPC competitive analysis is to find the competition and come up with an effective strategy that can improve the campaigns. Gaining an understanding of who your competition is and how they work in marketing can put you in a better position to outrank them on the search engine result page.

If you need more support for performing a PPC analysis then get in touch with our expert Digital Marketers at Encaptechno who have years of experience in online marketing. We will ensure that your business ranks higher and also gets noticed by your customers just as it deserves to.