How to analyse your competitors’ Google Ads Strategy

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How to analyse your competitors’ Google Ads Strategy

Last Updated on: 7th October 2023, 06:57 pm

Have you ever wondered why you see the same competitors at the top of Google every single time?

Have you wished you could figure out what they are doing to stay there day after day?

Today, we’re going to reverse engineer the strategy they are using to stay at the top.

Step 1 – Who ARE my main Competitors?

The first step is to pull together the list of competitors you wish to analyse. While this sounds simple – you just go and search Google, right? What you may be seeing are results that are dependent on your past search history and your location.

To identify the top competitors, I advise clients to use a combination of different and advanced strategies.

1)     Auction Insights – this will pull up recent competitors from a certain time period that have been overlapping with you, i.e. they have been bidding on the same keywords and in the same locations

2)     Ad Preview Tool – when you use this tool select the relevant location, device and keywords you wish to analyse and you will see the ads that are live right now. This has the benefit of showing you which advertisers are bidding in which location, so is vital for local businesses.

3)     A competitor research tool – this will pull up a list of those that have been advertising over a longer period of time so perhaps cannot be seen in the other tools. With this tool you can see which competitors have been advertising consistently for a period of several months or years, versus which competitors are brand new. It’s important to note that these tools will often miss out location-specific data – so if a competitor is bidding only in a certain town, this can be missed out completely which is why we need all 3 methods. It’s unlikely you will ever find all your competitors using just 1 of these 3 methods.

Step 2 – What keywords are they bidding on?  

The next step is to create a list of the keywords they are bidding upon. Various competitor research tools will allow you to download these. You can also see which keywords they have bidding on consistently for several months or years.

Your next task is to pull out the keywords which are relevant to what you offer, so you can use them to bid upon.

You’re also likely to see keywords that appear strange and you may ask yourself “why are they bidding on these?”. What’s probably happening is they are using a broad match keyword and are accidentally bidding on some poor keywords as a result, and wasting lots of cash! This is great news, as it shows you where YOU need to add negative keywords to save your own budget or even bid on the competitor’s brand name.

Step 3 – Analyse their messaging

The third step is to do the same with Ad Copy and Landing Pages – what ad text have they been using? Which messages have they been using most consistently? What has been working for them and why?

Once you’ve completed this analysis, it’s over to you to create better ads and landing pages that more closely match what the visitor is looking for. This will increase Quality Score (dropping your Cost Per Click to ensure you can compete successfully) while also including elements of your USP that ensure you get the lead rather than your competitor.

 Need Help? Book in a call!

I coach business owners, digital agencies, and their teams how to launch and run profitable Google Ads campaigns. If you’d like my help with your Google Ads strategy, let’s talk. Book in a call with me today.

Ready to take the reins? Achieve rapid Google Ads success in 7 easy steps with your copy of my best-selling Google Ads book!

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