Doing competitive research for PPC campaigns is crucial since it will be the foundation of your entire campaign setup. By conducting thorough competitive research, you can uncover insights that help you craft more effective campaigns, optimize your ad spend, and help you outperform your competitors. This step-by-step guide will walk you through conducting competitive research for PPC campaigns and will make sure that you have the right tools and knowledge needed to succeed.
Want to get started with PPC Campaigns?
How To Do Competitive Research For PPC Campaigns
Identify Your Competitors
The first step in conducting competitive research for PPC campaigns is to identify who your competitors are. This involves recognizing both direct and indirect competitors:
- Direct Competitors: These are businesses that offer the same or similar products or services as you do. They are targeting the same audience with similar keywords.
- Indirect Competitors: These are businesses that might not offer the same products or services but target a similar audience.
Analyze Competitor Keywords
Next step is to analyze your competitor’s keywords. This will give you insight into which keywords are driving traffic to their ads.
Identify high value keywords, focus on keywords that have high search volumes and low competition. These keywords can be golden opportunities for your PPC campaigns.
Evaluate Competitor Ads
Analyzing your competitors’ ads can provide you with valuable insights into their ad copy, offers, and strategies:
- Ad Copy: Pay attention to the headlines, descriptions, and call-to-actions (CTAs) used in your competitors’ ads. Note any patterns or recurring themes.
- Ad Extensions: Look at the types of ad extensions your competitors are using, such as site links, call extensions, and location extensions. These can enhance the visibility and effectiveness of your ads.
- Landing Pages: Click on the ads to see the landing pages your competitors are directing traffic to. Analyze the design, content, and offers on these pages to understand what might be appealing to your shared audience.
Monitor Competitor Ad Schedule
Understanding when most of your competitors are showing ads, can help you gauge the level of competition and adjust your own ad schedule accordingly.
Look for trends in ad schedule over time. Does most of your competitors show ads more at a specific time? This can help you plan your own ad schedule and adjust your CPC bids.
Use Tools For Competitive Research For PPC Campaigns
Competitive research is not a one-time task. It requires continuous data collection and analysis. A great tool that can help you identify your competitors, their keywords, and their ad schedule is PPC Reveal.
Use the data collected to set benchmarks for your own campaigns. Compare your performance against these benchmarks to identify areas for improvement. Use the insights gained from your competitive research to test new keywords, ad copies, and strategies in your own campaigns.
What Is PPC Reveal?
PPC Reveal is a competitive research tool that will give you insights that you can use for managing and optimizing your Google Ads campaigns. The app aims to help advertisers, regardless of their ad spend, by providing actionable data to improve return on ad spend (ROAS) and reduce cost per acquisition (CPA).
How To Use PPC Reveal
Step 1: Account Creation
To get started with PPC Reveal, you need to go to their website. Then click “Try it FREE” in the upper right corner.
You can see here that PPC Reveal has two features or plans. First is the Google Ads Competitive Intel where you can insights and data from your competitors, and the second is the Google Ads Performance Boost which will help you to monitor and optimize your Google Ads campaigns in one dashboard.
Since we are going to do competitive research for PPC campaigns, select “Learn More” under Google Ads Competitive Intel.
Here you’ll see each tier pricing for PPC Reveal Google Ads Competitive Intel. You can select which tier you prefer. You can also select if you want to pay monthly or annually.
You’ll have 14 days free trial so you can try the features first. Enter your payment details here to start the trial.
Once done, you’ll be redirected to your PPC Reveal Dashboard.
Step 2: Start A Reveal
To get started with competitive research for PPC campaigns, go to Google PPC Intel, and under it, click “Start A Reveal”.
Now you need to set up your reveal:
- Enter your reveal name, it can be your business name or the purpose of your data collection. In this example, we’ll be going to gather information for a dental implant clinic.
- Select the country you want to target here.
- Then select location type. How much data do you want to see? Is it city-wide? state wide? In this example, we’ll just select a city.
- Select which city you want to target. In this example, we’ll be looking at Los Angeles City.
- Make sure that desktop and mobile devices are turned on.
- Then select hourly frequency. We’ll just follow what PPC Reveal recommends, which is every 2 hours.
- Select duration. We’ll just follow what PPC Reveal recommends, which is 1 week. This will give you data from an entire week, which is more accurate than getting data from just a day.
- Now you need to input focus keywords that you want to look into or the keywords that are relevant to your business. In this example, we are focusing on the dental implant services keywords.
- You can add a note here if you need to.
- You’ll be able to see here the remaining units you have for your PPC Reveal. Every time you set up a reveal, it will cost you units. The number of units will depend on how many keywords, cities, hours, and days you need for the reveal.
- Click “Start Reveal”
Once done, you should be redirected to your PPC Reveal dashboard. You’ll see here that you have 1 active reveal and other information on the table.
Still don’t know where to start?
Step 3: View And Analyze PPC Reveal Result
After 7 days, you should see the completed status here (since the duration of reveal or data collection we set is 7 days/1 week). Take note that you can view the report earlier even if the status is not yet completed, but it’s better to wait until data collection is finished.
To view the result, click on the reveal name that you want to look into.
You should see the summary of your PPC Reveal result. You can download the full report by clicking on “Full Report Export”.
Advertisers
Click on the “Advertisers” tab to see the list of advertisers that are relevant to your selected keywords and location. You can filter it by locations, specific keywords, and devices. Download the entire data by clicking on the “Advertisers CSV Export” or “Advertisers PDF Export”.
The graph here shows how much their ads show up on Google search results and other Google platforms. This will also give you an idea of they spend a lot on ads or how well they are doing in terms of PPC Advertising.
Ad Copy
Click on the Ad Copy tab to see some of the ad copies of your relevant competitors. You can filter it by a specific advertiser/competitor, locations, keywords, devices, and specific terms. You can also sort it by their visibility or by URL if you want to see data ascending (ASC) or descending (DESC).
Scroll down to see more of the ad copies.
Having this information will help you get insights into what your competitors are putting in their advertisements. Some put pricing so you will have an idea of their rates. These insights will help you create better and more effective ad headlines and descriptions.
Ad Schedule
Click on the Ad Schedule tab to see ad schedule data of your competitors. This table shows when your competitor’s ads show the most.
This will help you with your ad schedule bidding. If you see fewer competitors showing ads at a specific time, then you can slightly increase CPC bids at that time to increase your ad rank or ad positioning. This is a huge competitive advantage.
Keywords
Click on the Keywords tab to see all relevant keywords that your competitors are also bidding on or targeting. This is also based on the keywords that you input on the PPC Reveal setup.
This is great data to look at because it will give you more keywords that you can target on your Google Ads campaigns. This will also explain why some keywords have a higher CPC bid since most advertisers are also bidding on them.
Want To Grow Your Local Business?
Get A Free Consultation With Our Experts
Conclusion
Competitive research is an essential component of a successful PPC campaign. By identifying your competitors, analyzing their keywords, evaluating their ads, monitoring their ad schedules, and continuously optimizing your efforts, you can gain a competitive edge and achieve better results. PPC Reveal is one tool that can help you gain insights and data from your competitors. Using PPC Reveal is a game-changer when it comes to creating and optimizing your Google Ads campaigns.
If you need help with Google Ads creations or PPC optimization, you can schedule a free consultation with our PPC experts today!
