The online space is getting highly competitive with every passing month, especially when it comes to e-commerce. Even though a good way to attract traffic is pay-per-click advertising, it’s very budget-demanding, which means you have to be very creative and careful when creating your Google Ads campaigns.
Fortunately, you don’t need to rack your brain over new creative ideas to make your advertising campaign successful. With enough competitive intelligence, you can use your competitors’ experience to give yourself the upper hand. Luckily, there are a lot of ways to find powerful optimization ideas, improve your ads’ performance and keep up with the latest marketing changes.
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There is a pool of great PPC tools that can help you see how your competitors rank, how many PPC ads they are running, how much they are spending and where they are being shown. In fact, these tools can show you the exact PPC strategy and provide insights into what is working well for other companies in your niche.
If you truly want to dominate your competition, the following tools could be great for planning a successful PPC campaign.
Everyone knows that Google Ads is the largest PPC management platform. Analyzing how the top advertisers in your industry are competing for keywords is a good way to take over their winning strategy. A great tool for PPC spying is SE Ranking.
The tool has a really clean and beautiful user interface. It allows you to find out your advertising competitors, what keywords they are using in their ads, how their ads look in paid search, how many clicks they get and what they are bidding in Google Ads. The platform also provides valuable competitive data like traffic volume, CPC, traffic cost, KEI and keywords number.
With the latest update in SE Ranking’s SEO/PPC tool you can get an overview of the previous stats by certain periods including positions, monthly budget and keywords. Moreover, you can get the previous year’s data.
This is a great place to spot winning keyword opportunities and get the best results out of your PPC campaign.
The Google Display Network is another great place to create special offers, as you can use its conversion funnels to reach target customers. Here you can see which of your competitors are running display placements, what display ads are working best and what publishers are showing them.
WhatRunsWhere can save you loads of your time and effort when it comes to figuring out what works best for your competitors thanks to the Display Network. The tool keeps an eye not only on display, text, mobile and banner ads in Google Ads but also looks at your competitors through other media channels like AppNexus, Media Buy, Rubicon, etc.
You can view all of your competitors’ banner ads and sort them by using AdStrength, which will show you which banner ads are most often seen through different placements and how long they have been running.
The best thing about WhatRunsWhere is that you can overview the overall PPC strategy of your competitors to better understand what changes you should apply to your own strategies.
Google is not the only source of traffic. A lot of PPC traffic comes from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. The first two networks are huge PPC traffic drivers.
Social media advertising is growing year-on-year and many companies are looking for effective ways to analyze their competitors and use this knowledge to increase conversions and generate more traffic.
To define what works for your competitors, you can use a great automated tool called AdEspresso. This tool helps you easily measure your ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram and get actionable insights.
With AdEspresso, it is easy to manage Facebook and Instagram ads and get more information on engagement for all of them. The tool also lets you see which competitors’ ads are performing best and which ones don’t work well.
Landing pages are a great tool to attract your target audience and convert searches into paying customers. If you want to grow a successful business, testing landing pages is essential when it comes to improving your PPC performance. Generally, you can’t see the landing pages of your competitors on the website, so you can use iSpionage to look at them.
The tool has a great landing page spying feature tool that allows you to view landing pages of your competitors, how they are doing and look at their split tests to figure out what works best. iSpionage explores different aspects of your PPC campaign, including providing you with insights into the most effective keywords used by your competitors, their ad budget and ad copy.
The tool has another great feature called the competitor alerts. You can automatically get notifications any time changes are made to a competitor’s landing page. Even if your competitors make minor changes, the tool will catch it to facilitate your continuous improvement. The same tool is available in SE Ranking’s arsenal as well - it’s called Page changes monitoring.
Nowadays mobile marketing is an important part of your overall strategy. Mobile advertising is very significant for local businesses who want their target customers to find them easier. Your website should perform well to handle mobile visitors as well. To make sure that everything is ok with your site, use mobiReady.
MobiReady is a free tool that helps you easily test competitors’ websites, see how they appear on mobile devices and how well they are handling mobile traffic. You just need to enter a site and you will instantly get results. Try to compare your site and your competitors and figure out how to improve your mobile experience on your site.
Bottom Line
Performing in-depth competitor analysis is essential when it comes to helping fine-tune your PPC strategy. As my good friend Maria Monroy from LawRank said, many people are afraid to copy their competitors as it may not work for them. But staying stagnant is far worse.
Analyze everything your competitors are doing, take over their ideas and make them better. It is a great starting point and will help you create successful PPC campaigns.
Using the right PPC tools can help you get an in-depth look of competitors’ keywords, ad copy, ad budget and profit analysis. You can see how their landing pages look and track all changes your competitors make on the daily basis.
Use the tools mentioned above to get the best and most accurate competitive intelligence to make your PPC campaigns as successful as possible.
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