Analysis of competitors in contextual advertising

Research of the competitive environment is an integral part of any marketing campaign, and contextual advertising is no exception. The emergence of a strong competitor will cause great difficulties. In particular, a decrease in audience coverage and an increase in cost per click.

In recent years, competition in contextual advertising has intensified. That is why it is important to understand that analysis of competitors in contextual advertising is a necessity that cannot be neglected.

How useful is the analysis of a competitor’s contextual advertising?

An analysis of a competitor’s contextual advertising allows you to determine the important elements of advertising campaigns:

• What and how competitors advertise, how often ads are set up, what strategies they use;
• What calls to action are they based on, how do they attract the user;
• Do they use ad extensions and extensions, and which ones;
• What ideas can you adapt to your advertising campaign?
• Approximately how many other companies spend on advertising.

What to consider when analyzing a competitor’s advertising campaign?

Benchmarking is now an important modern tool for increasing efficiency in any business. When analyzing the advertising campaign of competitors in search of the best techniques and ways of conducting contextual advertising, the following points should be considered:

1. Key phrases. This is what contextual advertising and impressions are based on. Using queries from competitors’ successful advertising campaigns instead of manually searching for them is much more convenient and often more efficient;
2. Ad titles and text. The positioning of a business and a product in contextual advertising is largely due to headings and text. Studying these elements in competitors’ advertising campaigns, their unique selling proposition, serves to find ideas that can be improved to create your own style. Ads from other advertisers can be found manually or using services;
3. Completeness of ads. Pay attention to whether your competitors use extensions and add-ons, whether contact details are filled in, whether dynamic advertising campaigns and site links are used. Everything that others have neglected can become your advantage;
4. Ad history. In the process of monitoring competitors, it is useful to study the history of their ads. How often they experiment and whether they go back to old versions will allow them to understand what works and what does not without compromising their own advertising campaign;
5. Landing pages. Landing pages are the first thing a user sees when they click on a link from a search engine. Analyze the landing pages of competitors for their completeness, relevance, way of presenting information and design. If they link users to shared pages, do better by creating different landing pages for each relevant query.

How to find out the budget of competitors?

Due to the fact that pricing in contextual advertising is influenced by many factors, it is not possible to find out the exact budget of competitors in Google Ads. However, this does not exclude the possibility of determining the approximate costs of competing companies. Knowing how much they pay per click, you can compare this indicator with your own and understand which display strategy is more appropriate to use – to focus on high-frequency queries that are expensive, or cheap low-frequency ones. You can calculate the competitor’s budget when auditing for certain key phrases as follows:

• Create an Excel sheet and add all the competitor keywords you need;
• Sort data by impressions, cost, and position;
• Reveal the number of clicks for each keyword;
• To determine the approximate CTR (click-through rate) of a competitor, compare it with your ad’s CTR for the same queries. If these words showed you in higher positions, decrease the indicators for a competing company a little and vice versa;
• Based on the found CTR, using a simple formula in Excel, we calculate the number of clicks:

Clicks = Impressions * CTR

• Next, we find the budget for this keyword by multiplying the number of clicks received by the cost per click;
• Summarize the data and get the total budget that another site spends on the analyzed keywords.

Competitor analysis in Google Ads

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After launching an advertising campaign, Google AdWords gives advertisers the opportunity to get information about who is in competition with you for a particular request, whether you are ahead of your competitors or behind. To do this, use the special report “Auction Statistics”. With this Google Adwords Competitor Analysis Report, you will benefit from:

• List of sites that are also shown for a specific request or group of requests;
• Percentage of impressions received – determines the share of impressions that were received in a specific period of time for your campaign and competitors;
• Average position of your ads in search results in comparison with other sites;
• The degree of intersection – how often your ads got into the same SERP with competitors;
• Win percentage – shows how often your ad was higher in the rankings than others;
• Next position coefficient – shows how often a competitor’s ad is higher than yours in one search results;
• The ratio of showing ads above the search results – shows how often your or another advertiser’s ad was shown above the search results, respectively, the algorithm considered it more relevant to the query.

Auditing competitors in our projects

Analysis of competitors in the advertising issue will allow you to “keep abreast” and monitor the behavior of other advertisers. Understand what tools they use, for what purposes, and evaluate what result they get. In reports and recommendations, we describe the strengths of advertising campaigns, advertising strategies and competitors’ websites, offer our clients ideas that can be implemented to get the maximum result right now.

Examples of competitor ad copy and their USPs (unique selling propositions) they use: