Competitors’ analysis is a primary task in marketing. Someone might say that it is not essential, as it requires much time. Others assert that competitors' research is important in all stages of company development as it lets save money. On the Short.cm blog, we explore one of the methods of analyzing competitors’ ads to help you draw your own conclusion.

You need to understand what to analyze and why. These are the options, which are essential while analyzing the competitors’ ads:

  • queries on your subject – find the most frequent users’ queries to reveal the competitors;
  • set of keywords – explore the keywords competitors use to make your list;
  • destination URL – see where they redirect users; estimate the destination page;
  • quality of ads – evaluate the headings, texts, especially CTA.

To learn these options, use some tools, which help you to get the necessary information. Serpstat is one of the services displaying detailed SEO data. Therefore, we’ll use Serpstat just for example.

Queries on the subject

Imagine that you’re running an online electronics store and want to figure out the competitors on the headphones field. Specify the keyword «Headphones» and get a detailed report. You’ll find the keywords, which your competitors use in the PPC ads. Remember to select a region for the search engine to get the proper results.

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Thanks to the received data, you can see that there is a demand for the headphones, and it’s about 3000 queries. This report lets you understand if it’s worth investing money in the line of business or not. There’s a significant risk to lose money as the supply can be too competitive or not competitive at all.

Keywords

Select some ideas for your ads and figure out how many keywords competitors use in their ads.

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The quality of ads

We can’t research on the competitors’ ads without additional SEO tools, because search engines don’t provide all the necessary information. SEO services help us to learn how many ads our competitors launch and the keywords they’re using.

The next type of report lets us find out the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors’ ads by analyzing headings, texts, special offers, and CTAs. We can examine ads to get the clues for our future campaigns. Creating the advertisement without competitors’ analysis may lead to the risk of setting a similar ad, or even a worse one.

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Destination page

Click on the title of the ad, and you will see the web page where users are redirected. You can define the relevance of the destination page with the ad content, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the website.

If the ad’s URL routes to the irrelevant page, the time, spent on that page by users, will decrease. Remember to use a URL, which is relevant to the title and text.

Bonus Tip

If you want to examine ads that are launched on Facebook by a specific competitor, you can easily follow this method:

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This way lets quickly explore the competitors’ ads. You can view the text, heading, and CTA. Such an approach is suitable only if you know who your competitors are. The disadvantage is the absence of the used keywords.


What did you learn?

  • How to learn the mistakes of competitors in ads.
  • Why do you need to analyze competitors' ads.
  • Market research.

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