How do we spy on the PPC competition?

In a competitive fight it is always an advantage to know what the competition is doing. From that you can adjust or improve your own activity so that you stand out amid the flood of competitors and, if you are starting out, it is an ideal place to take inspiration.

There can be many reasons for watching the competition and, without needing to be tortured, I admit we do it too. We use several tools that can uncover competitors' activity in various directions. I will focus only on tracking PPC activity, though many of the tools can be used for tracking SEO and other work as well. Where possible I will use our own data and our agency competitors as the example.

Google Ads – auction insights

These insights are available for search campaigns and show the competing advertisers you are fighting over the same keywords with. Auction insights in Google Ads have a page of their own in the online help. The drawback is that it shows only advertisers running ads on the words you yourself advertise on.

And how do we work with it?

Besides the overall view across every campaign, we also look at the insights for individual campaigns and ad groups.

TIP 1 – if no insights are shown, choose a longer period

TIP 2 – if tip 1 did not help, look at your impression share in the individual campaigns. Then use the filter to exclude campaigns with an impression share below 10%

Analysing the competition over time

Another interesting view is tracking competitive metrics over time, which can answer questions about changes in the average cost per click or in the position your ads land in. We normally do this analysis either in Excel or through Data Studio, but I recently came across a splendid predefined report from DASE, which you can download here after entering an email address: LINK.

In my example you can see how, once the coronavirus crisis set in, the advertiser marketinger.sk dropped out of search for 4 weeks.

I recommend playing with this report more, since it also shows interesting data on impression share and the like. For a better reading of the data, of course, it matters which campaigns the figures come from and which period we are looking at.

Facebook Ad Library

A very simple way of tracking your competitors' current Facebook ads is the Facebook Ad Library. The advantage is that it is entirely free and you need not even advertise on Facebook. On the page you simply type the competitor's page name and see their current ads. Here you will also see so-called dark posts — posts not normally visible on the FB page but used for advertising.

The Heureka range report

If you advertise on Heureka, you also have an anonymous competitor report available free of charge. The Heureka range report can be useful if you want to find out how your prices compare with the rest of the competition advertising on Heureka. The drawback is that you cannot see which competitor is which, though that can be worked out afterwards easily enough.

The report can be downloaded easily under "Statistics and reports". After that it is a matter of working in Excel. The table shows interesting figures such as "your price", "lowest price" and how many other advertisers appear for a given product.

Since many e-shops carry thousands of products, I would recommend working with filters. In my case I filtered for products I do not advertise myself. We can then compare, say, my price against the lowest price for particular products on Heureka. I added two new columns showing the percentage difference between my price and the lowest one, and the total price difference.

The formula used in cell AJ2 is "=P2/L2-100%", the numbers formatted as %.
The formula used in cell AK2 is "=L2-P2".

I applied conditional formatting to the new columns so that, in a report of thousands of products, I could quickly identify the largest percentage and total price differences. We can then approach pricing so as to be more competitive, which of course does not automatically mean being the cheapest.

Marketing Miner

Another tool, which we use more for SEO analysis but which also shows PPC data, is Marketing Miner. It now offers data on your competitor's advertising within Google search as well, but we still use it mainly for analysing the competition in Heureka advertising.

Just upload your Heureka feed, enter your domain and Marketing Miner takes care of the rest. The report shows competitors' prices too but, unlike the report available in the Heureka interface, here you can see exactly which competitor is which. You can also see how many competitors there are on a given product card in total.

Marketing Miner is a paid tool, though, and we use it more for tasks tied to search engine optimisation. This functionality is a pleasant extra, but I probably would not pay for Marketing Miner for it alone.

Collabim and Ahrefs

The tools Collabim and Ahrefs are further paid options. The advantage is that we can find out who appears for chosen keywords and with what ad copy, or find out exactly which keywords the competition advertises on and take inspiration. Quite possibly before we start advertising at all.

These tools too are used primarily for SEO work, but they have found a use in analysing PPC competitors as well. We use Collabim mainly for analysing ad copy, so that we know which benefits the competition communicates and which calls to action they use in their ads. That way we can write copy that stands apart and, for instance, brings out a particular advertiser's unique advantages, so that our copy is not about the same thing as some competitor's.

It is quite simple. Just choose one-off analyses and, among them, PPC analysis.

You enter at least one keyword; in this example I will use "online agency". Normally I would analyse words that are expensive or heavily searched, or words where we see a below-average ad rating in terms of expected click-through rate and where better-written copy could help that measure.Then I choose only the first option and confirm, after which the analysis runs. The fewer words you want to analyse, the faster you reach the results.

Once the XLSX file is downloaded you have a report with the domains and the ad copy broken down by day. For a single keyword several ads from one advertiser may be shown. Using filters you can review this information quickly and write your own ad copy so that it stands out in the context of the competition.

In Ahrefs the whole process is somewhat simpler. Just enter the competitor's domain in the field and then choose one of the links in the Paid search section of the left-hand menu.

The drawback of Ahrefs is that it holds less data than Collabim on local brands. That is why we always prefer Collabim for this kind of analysis.

Watching the competition matters in PPC advertising, since it directly affects the prices we pay for advertising. It lets us find out when the competition advertises and what ads they use. Thanks to that we can stand apart and reach the same target group more compellingly.