PPC analysis is crucial to getting ahead in digital marketing. It shows you what your competitor is doing and can reveal ways to improve your website to get more clicks and conversions. Performing a detailed competitor PPC analysis allows you to see what your competitors are doing and how you can improve to match them or stay ahead of the pack.

It is a systematic process of identifying your competitors in the Google Ads auctions, deconstructing their keyword strategy, and evaluating the effectiveness of their messaging. It isn’t about copying or imitating them—the analysis helps you understand the industry through their tactics, identify gaps in the market, and refine your approach before or even after a campaign launch.

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What are the Benefits of PPC Analysis?

Regular PPC competitor research provides a strategic advantage, ensuring you don’t miss a trick. You don’t want to be considered slow to adapt or straddle behind your competitors. Analysing any changes to the market and how your competitors adapt means that you know exactly what they’re doing and can go one better. A structured analysis provides the context necessary to make informed decisions and improve campaign performance.

The primary benefits include:

  • Benchmarking Performance: You can set realistic KPIs by examining competitor performance. Understanding aspects like a competitor’s estimated click-through rate or top of page rate in your shared market provides a baseline backed by data that can help you achieve your goals.
  • Strategy Refinement: You can identify what aspects of your competitor’s sites already resonate with your target audience. It could help you refine your ad copy or landing pages, improving the website’s quality score.
  • Identifying Opportunities: A comprehensive paid search analysis will almost certainly reveal valuable keywords that competitors are bidding on that you’re missing out on. Conversely, it could also reveal keywords they’re not targeting, allowing you to take advantage.

 

Step 1: Identify Your Competitors

Before successfully analysing the competition, you need to understand who your PPC competition is. The data can reveal competitors you haven’t even heard of, which is one of the reasons it can be so important.

 

Your first stop should be third-party competitive intelligence tools like SEMrush, which allow you to conduct ad research by simply entering a domain. However, the most definitive source for identifying your direct competition for PPC is Google Ads Auction Insights. The report is so valuable that it can fundamentally change how you approach PPC. It compares your performance directly with other advertisers using the same actions. Important data shown in the report includes impression share, absolute top of page rate and overlap rate. These figures show how you compete by comparing your statistics with everyone else.

 

Step 2: Use Competitor PPC Analysis to Identify Their Strategy

Once you’ve identified your competitors, you need to deconstruct their approach, which can give you a better idea of how PPC works within your industry. The goal here is to understand the mechanics of their campaigns to inform your own.

 

Keyword Research

It’s easy to assume that your SEO keyword list will be fully transferable to your PPC campaign, but this can be costly. The intent behind competitive paid search can differ significantly. A user searching for “best running shoes” has a different intent than one searching for “buy Nike Air Zoom.”

 

With that in mind, you need to perform a specific PPC competitor analysis for keywords. Use a tool like SEMrush’s Keyword Gap to compare your domain against your competitors. It will provide you with a clear list of the types of keywords they are bidding for that you aren’t. This exercise is fundamental to building a comprehensive keyword targeting list.

 

Ad Placement Analysis

Practical PPC analysis isn’t just about SERPs. You need to look at where else their ads are appearing. Are they targeting users on YouTube? Are they running display ads on specific industry websites or blogs? Analysing this gives you a better understanding of their digital footprint and can help you compare it to your own site. By looking at your display impression share, you can identify which areas you may need to increase your PPC visibility. Doing this can improve your campaign performance.

 

Step 3: Analyse their Ad Copy and Landing Pages

A successful PPC campaign doesn’t just rely on an effective advertisement. The ad must seamlessly take the user from the advert to the final conversion point. To do this, your ad copy and landing pages must be as compelling as possible, meaning they’re designed and implemented with user experience in mind.

 

Ad Copy Analysis

Your competitors’ ad copy should address customer pain points while promoting their services, leading the user closer to converting. When reviewing their ad copy, ask yourself:

  • What specific keywords are they targeting in their headlines and descriptions?
  • Is the ad copy well written? Does it highlight their value proposition?
  • What is their primary call to action (CTA)? Is it benefit-driven (“Save Time Today”) or direct (“Shop Now”)?
  • What promotions, offers, or unique selling points are they highlighting?

 

After answering questions like this, you can determine to what degree your ad copy needs to be improved. Improving aspects like this can increase your click-through rate by allowing you to speak more directly to your customers’ wants through answering relevant questions and promoting your services more efficiently.

 

Landing Page Analysis

The landing page needs to fulfil the ad’s promise – it needs to build on the point made in the ad to justify why the user clicked on it in the first place. When analysing a competitor’s landing page, assess its structure and content. The messaging should be clear, focused and speak directly to the target audience. The layout should be clean, guide the user’s eye and feature a compelling CTA. If their landing page experience is poor, it presents you with an opportunity to provide the customer with a better site experience. Even if you don’t make any changes, paid search analysis is still crucial because it lets you keep an eye on your competitors to ensure you still have the edge concerning your content and how it’s presented. PPC analysis

 

Step 4: Identify their Target Audience

By analysing your competitors’ ad copy, keyword choices, site structure and landing page messaging, you can start to build a profile of their target audience. This is a critical piece of the puzzle, and you can begin comparing their target audience with yours to see how you can make your services stand out. Ask yourself:

  • What is the tone of their language? Is it casual, professional, playful or technical?
  • What specific pain points does their copy address?
  • How are other pages structured on their site? Do they use a template? Do they have a set structure, or do they have more of a fluid site structure?
  • Based on their messaging and ad placements, what demographics are they likely trying to target?

 

PPC competitor analysis like this can refine your own targeting. Working out what competitors are targeting can help you evaluate your campaign performance to see if changes need to be made to your site. You can either compete for the same audience with a stronger message or pivot to serve a market segment they may be neglecting.

 

Analyse their PPC Budget and Ad Spend

Whilst you will never know the figure down to the last penny, tools like SEMrush can provide reliable estimates of a competitor’s PPC budget and ad spend. This isn’t designed to make you up your ad budget – it’s just to understand how they’re delegating their resource to know what you’re up against.

 

Seeing how they allocate funds can reveal their priorities. Are they investing heavily in high-cost, high-intent keywords or focusing on brand awareness through the display network? Understanding this can help you identify what they’re targeting and how you can target other areas at a more effective spend, or see which areas they’re missing out on to create a strategy that focuses on keyword opportunities.

 

Step 6: Analyse their Performance and ROI

You need to combine all this data to get a sense of their overall performance and estimated return on investment. By looking at metrics like estimated traffic from paid search and average cost-per-click, you can begin to model their campaign performance.

 

The main benefit of doing this is to see how your business compares. If, for example, the competitor has a much higher PPC budget, you can create realistic KPIs for your own campaign based on what you’ve found. If you see that top competitors have an average top of page rate of 60%, aiming for 95% on a limited budget may be unrealistic. This lets you create a more innovative, focused campaign from day one.

 

How Has Our PPC Analysis Helped Clients?

PPC analysis is the foundational bedrock of our PPC services because it helps us determine what our clients need to improve their site’s performance. We’ve used our years of expertise to help many clients improve the performance of their PPC campaigns.

 

With Crisis, we improved their clicks by 20%, revenue by 61%, and return on ad spending by 493%! With Shake that Weight, a combination of PPC and content marketing led to a 122% increase in mobile goal completions, a 44% increase in mobile conversion rates, and a 32% increase in tablet conversion rates.

 

Want Help with Your PPC Analysis? Contact Us Today

Performing competitor analysis is complex, but it’s essential for you to understand more about your industry. It’s part of what we do, enabling us to create efficient PPC campaigns that help improve our clients’ performance. If you want to gain a definitive advantage over your competitors, our PPC services can provide the insight and execution you need.

 

Contact Salience today to learn more about how we can help.