How to Conduct Competitor Analysis Before Launching Contextual Advertising

Competitive analysis helps to avoid a number of mistakes when preparing advertising, to form the right promotion strategy and to better understand the market. It is important to understand how competing companies are promoting in this area, what queries they choose to increase traffic or how much money they spend on campaigns. It is not enough to create a cool product and high-quality creative.

Analysis of competitors in contextual advertising will help you figure out:

1. Who offers a similar product and how does it do it.
2. What market share do competitors occupy, is there an opportunity to develop in a niche, to occupy it.
3. Identify strengths and weaknesses.
4. Minimize risks, choose a more effective strategy.

A strong competitor can appear at any stage of work on a product, for example, he began to cooperate with a good agency. What is fraught with this: advertising coverage decreases and the cost per click increases.

To conduct reconnaissance, it is better to know the companies by sight and effectively analyze their contextual advertising. We offer an overview of the best services with a description of the basic principles of their use.

Why do you need to analyze your competitors’ advertising

To collect, systematize and study information about competitors, thereby improving your own product and its sales channels. The analysis includes several steps:

1. Studying the semantics of sites and keywords.
2. View the history of ads and what edits were made to them as you worked.
3. Analysis of creatives – to evaluate which texts give the best response and bring more potential customers who have completed the target action.
4. Assessing the completeness of creatives and finding the best places to place campaigns.

To make the research more effective, it is important to correctly define your own business goals. You should focus not only on companies with the TOP search results, but also on indirect competitors – this will allow you to see a more complete picture. What is studied first: keywords, negative words, ads and landing pages.

Such work has an extremely high efficiency – with relatively little time investment, analyzing competitors’ advertising will help save time and money, achieving high conversion.

The Best Tools for Competitor Analysis in Contextual Advertising

The operating principle of many of the listed services is practically the same, with the exception of the personal account interface and some additional options. Let’s take a closer look at which sites make it easier and faster to analyze the advertising campaign of competitors.

SE Ranking

Offers a variety of tools for effective analysis of competitors’ SEO tactics. Using this marketing platform, you can evaluate the effectiveness of a web resource and monitor its ranking in a few clicks.

To get started, select the main keywords that characterize the direction of the site and enter them into the “Keyword Analysis” tool. To create a list of competitor sites, you need to study the organic search results for similar search queries to the search engine.

The site has many keyword metrics that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness and prospects of promotion. For example, study the frequency of queries. The “Competitor Analysis” tool will allow you to analyze the site and view matches with different companies, compare traffic volumes, and much more. Some of the options are available for free during the 14-day trial period.

Using the tool, you can better understand the marketing tactics of your competitors and find out which ads bring them more organic traffic. This will help you identify the most useful queries that you should take into account in your advertising efforts.

SpyFu

A useful service, the interface of which is completely in English. It helps to perform almost all types of tasks: research keywords, incoming links, view reports, and also perform a deep analysis of competitors. Here you can view competitors’ advertising campaigns in Google, clarify what costs they incurred for each of the low- and high-frequency queries.

The service’s tools will help collect some unique data, including:

1. The most profitable keywords (“create a landing page”, “buy a Lenovo laptop”).< /span>
2. Estimated traffic price and estimated traffic.
3. Information about the budget that is spent monthly.
4. Backlink data.

SpyFu is most suitable for companies that work for foreign clients. It is advisable to systematize data on the CIS and almost all European countries using other services. All received information can be instantly exported to PDF.

SimilarWeb

A service for deep research of landings, multi-page sites, applications and ads. An invariable attribute in the arsenal of marketing companies and SEO analysts. Beginners are offered a free trial period, but for deeper analytics you need to pay for the full set of tools.

The platform has a well-thought-out functionality that allows you to study traffic indicators, view a list of traffic channels, study a list of keywords and even evaluate customer behavior. With its help, you can build a successful and effective advertising campaign.

Ahrefs

A tool for planning marketing activities. Provides access to a wealth of information about the site and allows searching by any keyword. The program interface is simple and clear, so it is easy to work with, and even a beginner can understand the functionality.

The most powerful tool available on the portal is “keyword explorer”. Using it, you can evaluate the complexity of the selected key phrase and select related words for better positioning. You can check not only a single word, but also a whole group.

Another useful section is the “content explorer”, which analyzes other people’s content and helps find ideas for creating your own. For example, you can enter individual words into a search engine to see a list of posted articles. There are SEO tools and options for analyzing backlinks, which are provided on a paid basis. All this is indispensable in the process of analyzing competitors’ advertising.

PromoPult

It will be useful for small and medium business owners. It will help to advertise from a functional account with an abundance of useful and easy-to-understand settings. You can start with the formation of suitable keywords, manage the reputation of the site and solve more specific tasks in Internet marketing. It is possible to download the received data in the format of a list or XLSX file, as well as generate convenient reports.

The page contains a tool that displays competitors’ words for which ads were shown in Google Ads and Yandex.Direct. This information will be useful for expanding the semantic core and highlighting the advantages of your company specifically among similar on the market.

How to analyze competitors’ contextual advertising step by step

Follow the steps:

1. Collecting semantics to select only competitive and convertible phrases for promotion. The resulting lists can be downloaded to Excel, which simplifies further stages of work.
2. View campaign history to identify the dynamics when making edits. How much effort competitors spent on creating an ad, how relevant they are, whether there are extensions.
3. Analysis of the text, headlines and content to find successful cases and ideas in favor of your campaigns.
4. Checking landing pages as part of SEO promotion to create high-quality landing pages that motivate to perform a target action. This way, you can understand how competitors attract customers, how they inform about promotions, whether the site navigation is convenient and the ordering process in general. Intelligence will help you understand “how to do it and how to do it right.”
5. Viewing media campaign results will help you find quality placements to get more impressions and responses. SimilarWeb is best suited for evaluating ad traffic.
6. At the final stage, it remains to calculate the budget to understand how much money can be allocated for advertising and how much the current campaigns will cost in principle.

Analysis of competitors’ advertising campaigns is advisable to conduct regularly, and not just before launch. It can be done during the placement process, during promotions or before seasonal sales and holidays, tracking the dynamics and trends of the rapidly developing world of online advertising.

Collection and processing of semantic data

Semantic core is the basis of any contextual advertising. Keywords are phrases that a user uses to search for goods or services in a search engine. This is a mandatory attribute of an ad, the correct choice of which determines how many people will see it and whether they will be the target audience. The easiest way to collect effective words or entire phrases is to check what queries others use to advertise.

In the SE Ranking service, you can get a detailed table with the keys that competitors use through the “Paid traffic” section. To do this, enter the site name in the search, specify the region for the search and click on the “Keywords” section. In addition, you can select a batch analysis of thematic queries, find similar ones or use search suggestions.

In the “Traffic” column, you can evaluate the effectiveness of a particular word that allowed a competitor to receive more traffic. In the “Keyword Manager” section, it is convenient to view popular organic queries, trends, and frequency.

At this stage, the task of analyzing SEO metrics comes to the fore: how many impressions per word per month, average position in search results (it may be possible to change the position by changing just a couple of keywords).

To select effective phrases for use in your own projects, do not forget to analyze CPC. The analysis can be carried out only on one site or compare several competitors with each other.

When working through SpyFu, in the search bar through the PPC Research menu, enter the domain and click “Keywords”. The report clearly shows how many impressions there were for the word, what the CPC price was, how much was spent in total on the company’s marketing goals and what the percentage of clicks was.

To properly conduct analysis of the contextual advertising market, information can be studied separately for each keyword – after clicking on the phrase, a detailed report opens. In this way, you can collect a database of keys from competitors, which you can use when creating your own campaign. Thanks to filters, phrases can be sorted by effectiveness in order to work only with effective ones.

The SimilarWeb platform has everything you need to effectively work with the semantic core. To get started, enter the domain in the search bar and click “Search”. The right side of the page will display data on queries that generate the lion’s share of the company’s traffic.

The platform also has an option to generate keywords with the ability to customize filters.

Changes made to advertisements

With the help of information about the history of ads, you can find out how often companies implement and test different creatives for ads, which of them show the best performance. The analysis will help to identify effective formats and avoid making mistakes when creating a campaign, which will lead to a drain on the budget.

In the process, you need to answer a number of questions:

1. For which queries or combinations of words do competitors most often create advertising.
2. Do they make changes to the text of the ads and does this affect its positions?
3. Which campaigns are currently running and what position they are in.

For example, a company launched several ads more than 6 months ago and changes their text only slightly. This means that the format is highly effective and can be taken into account. It is better to start the analysis with creatives for large seasonal sales or holidays. If they are constantly making radical edits, then the effectiveness is low.

The SE Ranking website has a tool called “Competitor Analysis”, to work with which it is enough to enter keywords to see the full results. The functionality of the site allows you to pay to unlock the ability to view text and creatives broken down by month or for several years – only current or past campaigns, see traffic and share.

SpyFu service provides convenient tools for analyzing history. To work, go to the “add history” section and enter a keyword. The service will provide a breakdown of advertisements by month. With a simple click, you can select any of the options to view it, evaluate the titles and texts.

Reports can be filtered by best or worst keywords, or ad samples can be saved as a handy screenshot. If a competitor returns to old creatives, it means they are working more effectively.

Analysis of text and headlines of competitors’ ads

This is the next stage of analysis of competitors’ advertising campaigns. The goal of any advertising text is to attract the attention of a potential buyer of a product or service. It is important to make such an impression that distracts a person from current thoughts and makes him focus on the product.

To arouse the interest of a potential buyer, advertisers use various kinds of bait in the text of the ad: interesting headlines, phrases or pictures, having previously analyzed consumer demand. This will allow targeting the ad to a specific consumer.

At the previous stage, you identified the most productive competitor ads, now you need to carefully analyze them. Evaluate the presentation, text, content and headlines. Together, all these parameters help promote the ad to the TOP of the search results and attract users.

Consider the following parameters:

1. How fully the title and description are designed, what is the semantic load.
2. Is there a call to action and in what format is it added.
3. Is the ad text relevant to the keyword.

The more detailed these aspects are, the better the ad will be. To evaluate competitors’ texts, we suggest using special tools.

When using SE Ranking, go to the Competitor Analysis tool menu and Ad History. This shows your ad titles, date they were published, traffic share, and text.

The SpyFu service has almost the same capabilities. Through Ad History, you can view headlines and texts in their entirety, and go through the most effective of them. Remember that successful cases cannot be completely copied when creating your own advertising, but you can take them as a basis and supplement them, making them more interesting and consistent with the brand theme.

Assessing the completeness of competitors’ ads

When analyzing competitors in contextual advertising,pay attention to whether there is a virtual business card and how it is filled out, whether extensions or dynamic inserts are used. If not, you have the simplest technique on your hands to make creatives more noticeable and stand out with minimal effort. You can search for additional elements yourself or use specialized services.

Using SpyFu – you need to log in to your account and go to PPC Research, then find the Ad History section. Here you will find screenshots from search engine results. All of them are clickable and allow you to immediately see whether a competitor uses different types of extensions in their ads.

There are other useful options, such as rating, reviews or links to the main pages of the site. Use the information obtained for better performance.

Studying the content on a landing page

At the previous stages, you identified the optimal ad formats, their text and other parameters. Next, you should take a closer look at the landing page, the quality of the content of which determines whether the reader will want to make a purchase.

If you are performing analysis of competitors’ advertising, check what page the ad redirects to, whether it meets the query, whether it has a unique design or other differences. Perhaps, for some queries it is necessary to create several separate pages, especially if other companies are trying to lead the buyer to a common page.

What parameters are taken into account:

1. CTA buttons.
2. Is the content relevant to the request.
3. Ease of navigation on the site for optimal search engine optimization, usability.</ li>
4. How useful and informative is the content.
5. Is it convenient to subscribe to the newsletter and place an order?

SE Ranking tools help analyze landing pages via the “Paid Traffic” and “Pages” buttons. All landing pages that other companies send customers to will be shown here. Those that brought the most traffic are displayed at the top of the list. The site also shows predicted traffic, its estimated cost, and keywords.

Another useful resource for this purpose is Serpstat. On the page, you need to enter the domain, click on “Site Analysis” and go to the “Landing Pages” menu functionality. Just a few steps will allow you to see the full list of pages to which the competitor’s ad leads. Everything is structured and clear – you can view the total number of ads on each page.

Evaluation of competitors’ advertising in the Display Network

Collecting information from competitors on the media advertising they use is quite difficult, but some useful data can be obtained by using SimilarWeb.

This will allow you to understand what banners your competitors use, where they place them most often, in order to use this information when creating your own ads.

The SimilarWeb report will allow you to find out the basic data:

1. Do competitors use display advertising at all?
2. How does this affect their traffic, how many unique visitors it brings.
3. What media networks are used, the names of the most effective platforms that can be adopted.
4. The audience tab will allow you to get even more data about the interests of users who most often visited the competitor’s site.

What budget is used by competitors for promotion through online advertising

Competitor analysis in contextual advertising should be completed by planning media costs and calculating the expected number of impressions. It will not be possible to find out the exact amount of expenses, even if you use several services for this purpose. In addition, the data they provide is based on the cost per click or the amount of traffic in Google or Yandex, while advertisers can use many other media and shopping advertising campaigns to get traffic from additional sources.

But even knowing the approximate budget of your competitors can be useful. This will require careful analysis of the numbers and distribution of traffic between campaigns.

To study costs through SE Ranking, you need to go to “Paid Traffic” and “Keywords”. The graph will clearly show the competitor’s advertising costs broken down by year and month, which will allow you to view information for a separate period. Just below in the table there is a breakdown of the estimated price for each group of keywords, thus it will be possible to more accurately approach the formation of the budget for your advertising campaign.

The dynamics of advertising costs is clearly illustrated by SpyFu. Go to the PPC Overview tab to see a summary chart with expenses by month for a given period of time.

What tasks can analysis of competitors’ contextual advertising help solve

Analysis of the contextual advertising market is not performed by all marketers, often paying too little attention to this important aspect. This affects the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. When and why it is worth looking at competitors’ advertising:

1. To understand who else on the market has a similar product. In the age of e-commerce, this is simply necessary.
2. Assess the market share of competitors and assume whether there is a chance to take it independently.
3. See in what direction competitors are developing their product. New products and services are usually released with a new advertising campaign, the effectiveness of which will help to assess whether there is demand for the product.
4. Draw conclusions on which direction to develop your business and avoid making other people’s mistakes. Decide what to add to make your marketing campaign more successful.

Conclusions and recommendations

Analysis of competitors’ contextual advertising is a wide field for work. Based on the consistently completed steps, it will be possible to understand through which search engine it is better to promote a product, how much money may be required, what creatives the target audience may like.

When searching for proven services, you should be prepared that there are no fully automated and reliable programs for this. Such sites collect information from open sources, scan the results, and only then generate reports. Therefore, you cannot choose one site and hope that the collected data array will be sufficient. You need to use at least several resources for different tasks and stages in your work.

Remember about quality preparation – before starting work, you need to think through the strategy and step-by-step procedure for actions afterwards. The result will be a quality package of information, which will give impetus to the faster development of your business. Feel free to rely on the developments of competitors. Improve your advertising campaigns wisely, not forgetting to bypass other people’s mistakes!