How to Do Paid Search Competitor Analysis to Improve Your PPC Strategy?

The road towards a thorough and well-rounded competition analysis for your pay-per-click strategy comes with many questions. If you’re in the midst of your PPC strategy, you must incorporate competition analysis to get the edge in your market.

In this article, we’ll outline how you should be tackling your PPC strategy and what to include for a highly effective competition analysis, along with a few other tips and tricks to ensure optimum PPC strategy success.

Your PPC Strategy Demands a “Big Picture” Analysis

Before you do anything, you need to get an overall look at the market.

The easiest way to go about this is by asking a few straightforward questions to guide you:

• How active is your competition?
• Who has your competition partnered with?
• How difficult is the competition?
• Did you notice any regional or seasonal trends in the field?

By exploring the dynamics of your current PPC strategy, you’ll be able to get a better sense of your target market and where opportunities lie.

Begin your PPC strategy by creating a short list of competitor websites for benchmarking purposes. Then, you’ll be able to observe their traffic volume and sources in order to gain a sense of their backlink profile and overall performance.

By comparing their key metrics against your own, you’ll be able to gain valuable insights into your audience and their user behavior.

SEO Analysis and Pay-Per-Click Strategy

Here’s the brutal truth of SEO over PPC: Unless you’re in the top three search results of Google, you won’t get much organic traffic.

Everyone with access to a computer or cell phone uses search engines, however with such fierce competition; there are plenty of things that can prevent your pages from reaching the coveted top spots. For one, it could be because of SEO technicalities and the constant maintenance required.

To combat this, you should learn about the organic visibility of your competition. If they appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), you still have a chance to appear there through paid ads.

These days, search engine visibility isn’t about the exact positioning, it’s about being visible.

A well-rounded competitor analysis will help structure your entire online marketing strategy to make this process as easy as possible.

Social Media and Pay-Per-Click Strategy Analysis

Social media platforms are considered as PPC platforms as many companies use social media as part of their larger pay-per-click strategy.

Pro tip: If your competitor hasn’t included social media in their own PPC strategy, this could be your chance to gain a competitive edge. Social media is an effective and inexpensive way to connect with your audience and direct leads to your site.

Now that you’ve narrowed in on your competition, it’s time to find out which social media platforms they’re active on if any. After that, you can assess their audience, the type of content they post and when, or how often they post.

Check to see if they’re using non-promotional or promotional posts. For promotional campaigns, you’ll need to identify the products and landing pages they use to fully understand their PPC process and develop a holistic view.

5 Tips for Your Pay-Per-Click Strategy Analysis

The PPC world is a magical one. It’s where the smallest efforts can provide profitable outcomes — however, to get to the promised land, you need an effective pay-per-click strategy.

Here are five ways you can learn from the competition to enhance your PPC strategy.

1. Identify Your Paid Competition

The first step is to identify your paid competition. This involves doing some solid research to figure out your true competitors. This is the first stepping stone for the rest of your plan.

2. Discover Your Competition’s Keywords

Next, find the keywords your competitors are bidding on.

Keywords are where you can unlock the secrets to gaining traffic. Make an extensive keyword list as they can help you understand user intent and how your competitor is benefiting from it through their PPC strategy.

3. Study Their Ad Copy

Once you’ve found your keywords, it’s time to study your competitor’s ad copy.

This ad copy reveals what the competition is offering. Look at their calls-to-action (CTAs) and think about how you can integrate similar ones into your own PPC ads.

4. Analyze their Landing Pages

Landing pages are crucial for user conversion. By analyzing your competition’s pages, you can get a sense of where the ads are leading. There’s a lot to learn from analyzing landing pages, and a lot to gain as well.

You must ensure your ads and landing pages are aligned to offer a smooth and seamless customer journey that is tailored to the needs of your target audience.

5. Mobile Optimization

Finally, make sure to optimize mobile use through your PPC strategy. This is no longer just a marketing trend, but a necessity for PPC advertisers.

Mobile optimization will help you stay ahead of the game and can create a competitive edge for your opponents.

Knowing Thy Enemy (Your Competition) is Vital for Your PPC Strategy

At this point, it should be clear why a competition analysis is vital to the success of your PPC strategy. By spending a few minutes a day on research, you’ll be able to study competitors and learn from them.

Compare your competitors against each other, rate them and see how you fit into the mix.

Competition is a great thing. It sparks innovation and therefore betters your business, your service or product and yourself.