Google Ads competitor analysis is the secret weapon to gain actionable insights into your rivals’ strategies and enhance the performance of your own ads. This is more like bringing your enemies closer, though in the world of digital advertising, your rivals are not really your adversaries. But they can be a threat to your existence if you aren’t paying enough attention to their moves.
Google Ads can help you understand your competitor’s ad copies, identify untapped keyword opportunities, determine their target audience, and spot unique value propositions. With such analysis, you can develop your campaigns with higher ad efficiency.
In this comprehensive post, we’ll discuss different sneaky tactics to spy on your rivals’ ads to maintain the agility, relevance, and efficiency of your strategy.
Five Simple But Effective Google Ads Competitor Analysis Tactics
Analyzing your competitors’ keywords and ads is the foundation of running successful competitor analysis. Everything else builds on this. Here are secret tactics to help you identify what your rivals are onto and turn their strategies to your advantage.
1. Conduct a Manual Google Search of Your Competitor
This sounds too simple to have any useful insights, but in reality, it’s a powerful way to understand your competitors’ ads. Simply run a search of the keywords your business uses and are most likely used by your target audience. We advise using a private browser window so your searches are not personalized.
For every keyword search, take a look at its search engine results page (SERP) and focus on the Google ads that appear at the top of the page. Take note of the advertisers behind those ads for the searched keywords. Check the positioning of the ads, whether they include extensions such as site links or call extensions since these often impact the performance and visibility of ads.
Analyze the ad headlines, descriptions, and any other text provided in the extensions to understand how your competitors are positioning their offerings. Take note of trends and patterns in the ads that appear on the SERP. How frequently are certain advertisers’ ads showing up when you use different keywords? Is their Google ad messaging changing over time?
2. Gain a Better View of Competitor Ads with Google Ads Transparency Center
The searches in the step above will give you a general feel of how your competitors do their thing. But if you want a deeper view of the ads your competitors are running, you need to use Google Ad Transparency Center. It’s more like Google’s ad library and, therefore highly useful in Google Ads competitor analysis.
You can quickly discover more about the ads you come across on SERP or YouTube. If you have experience with Meta’s Ad Library, they’re very similar. It goes beyond seeing a couple of ads when you run a Google search of your competitors. This ad library lets you search a competition and see their latest ads across all Google platforms, including Display, YouTube, and text ads.
Another way to access the Transparency Center is to run a Google search of a desired keyword and competitor’s name. Then click the vertical options dots and choose “See more ads this advertiser has shown using Google.”
Also take note of how often the competitor uses specific buzzwords in their copy, especially in the headlines.
3. Run Keyword Research to Plan Your Google Ads Budget
Up to the second step, you’ve identified who your competitors are and the spaces they occupy. Next, you need to make important budgetary decisions based on your findings. One of the biggest concerns of most advertisers is how big their Google Ads budgets should be. Well, a static answer won’t cut it because it all depends on your industry and which players are you competing against.
With the help of the free Google Ads tool, Keyword Planner, you can use it to determine what your ad spend against your competition should be. But that’s just one of the many users of the tool. To do this,
- In your Google Ads interface, go to Tools & Settingsà Planning.
- Click the “Discover new keywords” and enter the keyword you’d like to include in your campaign.
- Make sure the region for which you want to target those ads is correct.
- Check the “Competition” column. Using the Low to High indicator to know how hard and expensive it is to rank for a particular keyword.
- Check the “Top of page bid” columns to see the range of historical bids other advertisers used to maintain top positions for a specific keyword. You can then add the keyword into your strategy by setting your goal cost-per-click to be in line with desired metrics. With this set, you can bid competitively in the auction for that particular keyword.
Other than ensuring you place competitive bids, you need to remain updated with Google’s recommendations for your ad campaigns.
4. Use the Auction Insights Report to Trace Competitors
Another trick for building a successful Google Ads competitor analysis system is to use the Google Ads Auction Insights report. This report allows you to compare the performance of your ad campaign against that of other advertisers participating in the auction.
The report offers key insights such as impression share, outranking share, overlap share, top-of-page rate, and several others. You can use this information to make informed decisions when bidding and planning your budget to enhance your ad performance.
To access the Auction Insights report, sign in to your Google Ads account and select the desired campaign, keyword, or ad group, then click “Auction insights.”
5. Spy on Competitor Keywords Using Third-Party Tools
Third-party tools such as SpyFu and SEMrush are effective at uncovering the high-potential keywords your competitors are bidding on. Focus on the high-performing keywords that generate consistent traffic. If the competition is spending lots of money on keywords such as “affordable neon signs,” consider joining the bandwagon, but come with an irresistible offer.
SEMrush offers three powerful tools you can leverage to make your PPC ad campaigns successful. These include Keyword Magic Tool, PLA Advertising, and Advertising Research. These tools can give you highly valuable insights into the Google Ads campaigns, estimated traffic, keywords, and ad copy of your competitors. You can then use these insights to optimize your Google Ads strategy for success.
6. Monitor Competitors’ Display Ads
Track your competitors’ presence on Google Display Network using platforms such as Adbeat to see how and where they’re retargeting users. Another tool, Moat, can be useful in helping you know where your competitors are running display campaigns. You can go even further to identify the types of ads they’re using (carousel, banner, or video).
These tools can also help you to analyze the frequency, messaging tone, and targeting approach. Use the insights gathered to enhance your display network campaigns by spotting the opportunities or gaps competitors might have overlooked. This lets you stay ahead of your competition.
7. Evaluate Competitor’s Landing Pages
Another trick to performing Google Ads competitor analysis is to evaluate the competitors’ landing pages. Landing pages are the final frontier for turning clicks into cash, so spying on your competitors’ designs is a smart move.
Look at their headlines—are they shouting urgency with “Act Now!” or charming you with customer testimonials? Check out their CTAs, design flow, and even how fast their pages load. A smooth, visually engaging landing page can make or break conversions. Use tools like SimilarWeb to sniff out their traffic performance and adapt your own landing pages to one-up theirs with better visuals, faster speeds, and irresistible calls-to-action.
8. Use Google Ads’ CPC simulator
Think of Google Ads’ CPC Simulator as your ad strategy crystal ball. It lets you test different bid levels to see how they could impact your ranking, clicks, and costs. Say a competitor always snags the top spot—this tool shows how much extra juice you’d need to outbid them without draining your budget.
The CPC simulator relies on auction insights and historical data to approximate how the specified changes to a bid will affect ad performance metrics like CTR, clicks, impressions, and average position. Depending on how you’ve set your adjustments, the simulator can estimate the changes to your ad performance metrics. It then displays these changes in a graph or tabular format.
It’s all about finding that sweet spot where you’re winning clicks without blowing through your ad spend. With the CPC Simulator, you can fine-tune your bids like a pro and stay competitive in the ad game.
Conclusion
Competitors are refining their strategies every minute and Google-owned product interfaces keep changing, making it too demanding to stay on top of winning ad strategies. But you don’t have to do it from scratch when you can leverage Google Ads competitor analysis. Competitor analysis is a quick way of identifying what’s working without having to reinvent the wheel, and then use the gathered insights to optimize your ad campaign efforts.
The strategy you decide to use is entirely dependent on your preferences because no single approach is wrong. Just identify opportunities from the insights gained from analyzing your competition and optimize your ad campaigns. Rinse and repeat till you start witnessing improvements in patterns and trends.
Does all this feel overwhelming? With an expert like Eaglytics Co. by your side, you can uncover every bit of data that matters. We can help you build compelling ad strategies and set up powerful Google Ad dashboards to monitor your campaign performance in real-time. Get in touch and let us help you outshine your competition and own the Google Ads game.
