Including paid search in your marketing mix has several advantages, especially when combined with your regular organic SEO strategy.
By researching and comparing your competitors’ paid and organic search efforts with your website, you can get a good idea of which tactics they are employing.
It will reveal any gaps in their keyword strategy and allow you to identify untapped opportunities.
Understanding which paid keywords competitors are targeting, how they rank for them, and how much they cost should form the basis of your research into developing an effective PPC campaign.
This will be the most accurate indicator of where you should start focusing your ad spend for paid search activities.
The Tactical Strategy
Paid search activity allows you to be more tactical when necessary. Some common tactical scenarios in which you may find yourself include:
- Specific branded keywords are being defended.
- Campaigns that are aimed at specific audiences are promoted.
- Using branded and high-ranking keywords and search ads to target competitors.
All of this will aid in driving new users, defending a specific brand strategy, or attacking a competitor’s tactical positioning.
Fileproinfo’s Paid Search Overview tool allows you to learn about the budgets, keywords, search terms, and product ads that are driving their competitors’ paid search campaigns.
This allows them to plan their own paid search efforts in greater detail, as well as justify tactical spending decisions. With a few clicks, users can now quickly and comprehensively evaluate their competitors’ short-term campaign tactics or long-term strategies.
To begin contextualizing your paid performance and seeing how your competition compares, download our Marketing Channel Conversion Benchmarks report for the most up-to-date benchmarks.
How much do they spend?
Our new PPC spends estimation metric, which joins our other powerful traffic and engagement metrics on the Paid Search Overview page, provides a unique view of:
- When your competitors invest in PPC campaigns.
- How effective they are at driving traffic through those campaigns.
- What paid channels are they using to promote their campaigns?
- And there’s more.
There are numerous metrics you can focus on to improve your ROAS, but having an estimate of your competitor’s PPC spend will give you a better idea of:
- How much money they put into paid channels.
- The consistency with which they invest in paid search campaigns.
- How important PPC is to their overall search traffic as part of their digital marketing strategy.
A Bird’s-Eye View
A comprehensive view of a website’s paid search activity over time is extremely valuable.
By comparing that to core traffic and engagement metrics such as bounce rate, visit duration, search traffic, and more, you can see whether you or your competitors are winning or losing the PPC tactical battle.
Whether your overall paid search strategy is based on targeting previously interested leads or customers or pushing campaigns focused on nurturing prospects in the sales funnel with more personalized messages or ads, the Paid Search Overview page can help you pinpoint what has worked well elsewhere and allow you to refine your tactics for success.
Campaign Strategies of Competitors Exposed
Taking the PPC Analysis a step further, you might wonder: which landing pages and campaigns are the most successful for your competitors?
If they’re spending all of their money on keywords and ads, where are they sending their customers?
Fileproinfo’s Top Paid Landing Pages tool, which reveals the best-performing paid campaigns for any website, can easily answer this question.
You’ll be able to examine the landing pages that receive the most traffic on the target site, as well as drill down to discover the ads and top keywords that are driving that traffic.
Not only that, but you also get an estimate of the URL to spend, so you can see which campaigns are the big bets for any competitor and where their ad spend is going to drive visitors and conversions.
You have all the intelligence you need to ensure that your campaigns differentiate and appeal to your target audience by seeing the ads, messaging, and keywords that your competitors have built their PPC strategy around.
You can also begin to budget effectively and make the business case for investment in your PPC strategy if you have a view of the competitive campaign spend data. You can even calculate a predictable ROI for each campaign before launching it.
You now can understand what paid search campaign messaging is effective, consistent, coherent, timely, and accurately targeted at the appropriate audiences.
This improves and drives quality engagement, increases brand trust, and raises brand perception among target audiences and customers.
Increased purchases, customer advocacy, and (most importantly) customer loyalty and retention are all positive side effects of a well-researched, planned, and executed paid search campaign.
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