PPC Competitor analysis should be a regular and essential task for everyone involved in managing the PPC ad campaigns.
It is essential to know what messaging techniques your competitors are using and what keyword they are bidding on. Along with it, you should also know where your competitor is overlapping with you for keeping the campaign on point.
What is PPC competitor analysis?
PPC competitor analysis is the most crucial step in creating a successful advertising campaign. It can help you get valuable insights that will inform your targeting and bidding strategy. To do a PPC competitor analysis, you will have to identify the biggest competitors in your niche first. After that, you will have to figure out what keywords they are targeting so that you can create campaigns that are better than your competitors. PPC competitor analysis saves you the time of investigating each of your competitors manually.
PPC competitors can also be found with the help of the PPC competitor analysis tool. To find your competitor PPC data you can use the best PPC tools. Further in this article, we have discussed the PPC competitor analysis tools that would help you to do the PPC campaign analysis.
The Auction Insights sections in Microsoft Advertising and google ads offer almost every detail of information about where your competitors are bidding against you.
Accessing Auction Insights
As long as your account has enough data you can look at auction insights at the account level, by the campaign, by ad group, or by using keywords (or a set of keywords).
These segmentations can allow you to see what topics specific competitors care about, based on which ones show up on each campaign’s radar.
Google Ads
In Google Ads, the auction insight report allows you to compare your performance with other marketers who are bidding on the same keywords. This comparison report can help you in future decision-making. The platform provides six different statistics for a search campaign, including overlap rate, impression share, position above rate, outranking share, top of page rate, and absolute top of the page rate.
To get auction insights from your Google accounts, you can follow these steps when you enter into your google account-:
- Click on Campaigns, Ad Groups, or keywords that you want to analyze.
- Click Auction Insights.
- You can now take a look at your Auction Insight report.
Microsoft Advertising
To get Auction Insights in Microsoft Advertising, look for the “Auction Insights” tab on the top of the screen of your system, next to “Campaigns.”
You can also access information about Auction Insights for individual campaigns/ad groups/keywords similarly to Google Ads, by selecting the ones you want to include from the table and then choosing Auction Insights.
Microsoft Advertising also consists of a graph that allows you to check how your competitor metrics have changed over the period in a bar graph format. Interestingly, this chart option is one feature Google Ads does not have.
What is PPC bidding strategy?
A PPC bid strategy can help you do the bidding for a keyword in the most appropriate way. PPC bids can be made in two ways one is manual bidding and the other is automated bidding.
To know the bidding strategy in PPC, you can read the below points:
- Target Cost Per Acquisition by spending the stated daily budget to maximize the conversion.
- Target return on ad spend(ROAS) is among the top bidding strategies as its main focus is to increase the conversion value instead of conversion volume.
- PPC brand bidding strategy can consist of an important strategy that is to maximize clicks over conversion.
- Target impression share.
These strategies can also be considered as the PPC bid management strategies.
Applying For Auction Insights
You often have a question about how can you make this report practical to your account management process? The following are a few tips to look at and apply the facts to the account:
Identify New Competitors
Auction Insights are perfect for identifying the new competitors who are starting to scale up their advertising efforts.
If you see any new names you have not come across, you can bring those up with your client or marketing team to analyze what your competitors are doing online.
Often the people who compete with your brand most on search are not necessarily the people who are your top competitors.
You can also determine if brands that have existed but previously had not done much with the paid search are starting to put more budget into search.
If you observe your competitor suddenly having a high overlap rate compared to the past, you should know that they have most likely scaled up their budget in a PPC campaign.
You can also identify this if your competitors are expanding themselves by offering different products or services or even the regions where they grow their business.
For example, if you have separate campaigns for other countries, you may have seen a client overlapping in the US but not Canada.
By monitoring your competitors’ Auction Insights, you can see if they are expanding their advertising efforts into Canada and flagging potential international expansion efforts.
