How to Perform Google Ads Competitor Analysis: 2024 Guide

Google Ads competitor analysis is the bread-and-butter of many Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing strategies. Any paid marketing is highly competitive, as many businesses will want to get as much visual real estate as possible – whether that’s on a search engine or social media.

That’s how paid search makes money for the platform. As more companies bid on keywords or other types of visibility, the price of getting shown increases as well. Taking a look at your competitor’s Google Ads strategy, therefore, can provide you with numerous valuable insights.

The benefits don’t end at just finding keywords your competitors may have missed. Competitor ad copy, imagery, and bidding strategies are a quick and easy way to supplement your own Google Ads campaigns.

Why Competitor Analysis is Crucial for Google Ads Success

All paid search revolves around business competition. If there were none, there would be no issue in getting the best ad positions at extremely low rates. But you have to compete and pay a lot of money to get the desired ad positions, so you might as well make use of competitor strategies.

Most businesses monitor their competitor’s paid search actions for a few reasons. First, finding out which keywords they’re bidding for can inform you in a few ways. They may be missing a few important ones (or you may be missing them as well).

If a lot of competitors are bidding on a single keyword, you’ll know it’ll be extra difficult to get your name out there. So, you may want to reallocate your budget for more money-efficient keywords.

Additionally, you can uncover what strategies they are using to attract customer attention. Analyzing copy and images can help you identify new ways to tinker with your Google Ads campaigns.

Finally, you can also use them as a benchmark for your own Google Ads campaigns. If you’re losing a lot of search visibility or low impression share, you may need to make some adjustments to improve performance.

What Are the Best Tools for Google Ads Competitor Analysis?

For the best results, you’ll need some third-party tools to analyze competitor’s Google Ads campaigns. While you don’t need all of them, picking at least one will give you lots of additional information that may inform your own ad strategy.

SEMrush

SEMrush provides an all-purpose digital marketing suite that also includes paid search. Many companies use it for SEO, but the tools provided can also offer great insights into Google Ads campaigns.

There are a few handy tools you can use for competitor’s Google Ads strategy analysis. First, you can always just use the domain comparison tool and input your competitors there. You’ll get a full-scale overview of both organic and paid search.

Additionally, the Advertising Research tool is directly tailored towards analyzing PPC keywords. By inputting competitors, you’ll be able to find targeted keywords, ad copies, and positions.

Finally, the Keyword Magic Tool is extremely useful when you want to analyze your Google Ads competitors. It’ll show which keywords they’re bidding on, the average traffic, difficulty, competition level, and cost-per-click.

So, if you already use SEMrush to analyze Google SERPs, making use of it for PPC campaigns is a no-brainer. While it’s one of the most expensive marketing tools, if you use it for both channels, it’s definitely worth the cost.

SpyFu

SpyFu is a solution that was directly dedicated to analyzing Google Ads, making it a great advertising research tool. It has since evolved to be an all-rounder, but many still use it for analysis only.

There are a few great features that make it stand out as an advertising research tool. You can view historical Google Ads data, allowing you to better analyze trends and strategies.

Additionally, there’s a dedicated competitive analysis tool, basically instantly providing you with important insights, such as the most profitable ads and bids. You can also get detailed reports about your competitors.

Ahrefs

While it’s primarily known for SEO, many of the features can also be used for paid search. Ahrefs has a few dedicated features that showcase paid search insights, but it should be used as a supplement rather than your main source of information.

Like with SEMrush, you can compare domains and get an overview of both organic and paid search. Ahrefs also estimates traffic value and provides you with a detailed report of all the Google Ads keywords.

From that report, you can extract the cost-per-click and estimated traffic, and see the direct ad copy as it’s seen in Google SERPs.

It may also be a good idea to find your competitor’s top performing pages. You may get a lot of inspiration for both SEO and paid search that will allow you to improve your own Google Ads bidding and strategy.

So, as an advertising research tool, Ahrefs is quite limited, but can be a great supplement to your current strategy.

SimilarWeb

Mostly used for traffic analytics, SimilarWeb also provides detailed breakdowns of the popularity of a website. It’s a decent tool if you want to get insights into competitors’ overall performance.

As such, SimilarWeb is great for benchmarking performance, whether it’s through SEO or paid search. Additionally, you can get insights into audience demographics, which can help you further tailor your own strategies to get more accurate PPC targeting.

SimilarWeb is another tool that can act as a great supplement to overall Google Ads strategy, but shouldn’t be relied upon exclusively.

Google Ads Auction Insights

If you’re running Google Ads campaigns, you can get an important advertising research tool for free – Google Ads Auction Insights. You can get direct, real-time insights on your Google Ads competitors and extract various data points.

Additionally, you can find out shared keywords, audiences, and ad positioning. Google Ads Auction Insights provides all of the above in a nifty and handy quantitative view, making it easy to parse and analyze data.

There are a few other important data points such as impression share, overlap rate, outranking share, and many others. As such, it’s one of the best free tools for Google Ads campaign benchmarking and performance analysis.

Google Ads Keyword Planner

Google Ads Keyword Planner is a classic tool for both paid and organic search analysis. While it won’t help you conduct direct competitor analysis, it gives you a good overview of the entire landscape.

You can get a few important data points that help you improve your Google Ads campaign performance – competition level and CPC estimates. Additionally, you can also use it to find high-performing, low-competition keywords.

So, since Google Keyword Planner is free and easy to use, there’s no real reason to avoid it. You should, however, support Google Keyword Planner with other tools, as it won’t be enough for decent competitor analysis.

How to Conduct Competitor Analysis for Google Ads

To start conducting Google Ads competitive analysis, you’ll need to pick up at least a few of the tools listed above. Having at least one third-party solution in conjunction with the free tools Google provides is often the best option.

You’ll then have to start out by listing out all Google Ads competitors. Find all the keywords they’re bidding on and collect as much data as you can through the tools that are at your disposal.

Additionally, make sure to review all ad copies, images, and bidding strategies. Avoid adjusting everything at once, however, but tinker with things one at a time.

You’ll likely want to start out by checking if you’re missing any important keywords in your Google Ads campaign strategy. Adding them to your campaigns may add the biggest bonus for the least effort.

After collecting lots of ads, you may want to refine your own ad copies. Some things just work better for Google search results – experimenting with ad copies and images is a great way to figure out the best approach.

Finally, if your tools support it, analyze the demographics your competitors are targeting. You may be missing a large portion of your potential audience. Improving targeting is often one of the best ways to improve overall ad performance.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Google Ads Competitor Analysis

While following your competitors is a powerful way to improve your own performance, there are definite drawbacks to the approach. Primarily, if you overfocus on competitors, you can only get as good as they are, never better.

Additionally, too much analysis can lead to indecision. Sometimes, it’s better to just run campaigns and see what happens (if supported by some level of data). Experimenting is still one of the best ways to figure out what works.

You should also avoid making changes as soon as your competitors do. They are also experimenting a lot and many experiments end in failure. In addition, you never know why they’re making the changes – what works for them may not always work for you.

Finally, don’t focus on just competitor keywords. Sometimes, you’ll find good long-tail ones that no one is targeting and picking them up may improve your performance. On the other hand, a lot of ad performance depends on landing pages – blindly following bidding strategies and keywords may not bring the same results your competitors are getting.