You don’t must be the subsequent James Bond to start out PPC spying—all you want is a license to Ahrefs.
On this article (on your eyes solely), I’ll share what PPC spying is, why it’s vital, and share seven methods you can begin spying in your opponents’ paid search campaigns.
PPC spying is when companies use advertising and marketing intelligence instruments, like Ahrefs, to acquire knowledge about their opponents’ pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaigns.
The goal of PPC spying is to improve your PPC campaigns by adapting your strategy based on what your competitors are doing.
It’s important for the following reasons:
- Gives you a competitive advantage — PPC spying enables businesses to outperform their rivals by identifying their top-performing ad creatives, keywords, and overall strategy
- Helps you identify important trends — PPC spying helps you identify paid search trends across all of your competitors rather than focusing on a single ad on a search result
- Provides ad inspiration—Spying and analyzing competitors’ ad copy enables you to improve your own ads, which could help increase your conversion rates and click-through rates
Overall, PPC spying is important because it gives you a bird’s-eye view of your competitors’ PPC strategies, which you can use to improve your own.
So, without further ado, here are seven ways to start PPC spying on your competitor’s Google ads using Ahrefs.
Let’s begin with the fundamentals. The very first thing you need to discover out is how a lot site visitors your opponents are getting and what it’s costing them. You may see each utilizing the Ahrefs Paid site visitors report—for any web site.
Find out how to do it
To entry this report, enter their web site URL into Site Explorer. I’ve entered canva.com as an example.
Then click the Paid search tab below on the Overview. You’ll see the Paid traffic report, where you can toggle traffic and traffic costs on and off. This will display a time series graph that automatically plots the historical data.
Also, if you scroll back up to the dashboard and look for Paid search on the right-hand side, it shows you the estimated number of monthly searches your competitor gets from paid search and the estimated monthly cost of the traffic.
Why it’s useful
Being able to check on any of your competitors’ paid search performance provides you with insights into their budget for PPC and the traffic acquired. Looking at the Canva example, we can see that they ramped up their PPC spend, which led to huge spikes in traffic due to the Black Friday weekend before Christmas in the last quarter.
When you work with a shopper that operates in a number of territories, likelihood is their opponents will even be working throughout a number of territories.
To spy in your competitor’s paid site visitors throughout completely different areas, you need to use Ahrefs’ Paid site visitors by location report.
This report reveals you the international locations from which your competitor is getting essentially the most paid site visitors.
Find out how to do it
The Paid site visitors by location report is to the best of the Paid site visitors and Paid key phrases stories.
Why it’s helpful
If certainly one of your opponents expands to a brand new territory, they’ll probably check the waters with PPC to see in the event that they get any traction. This report reveals the place a competitor is spending most of their PPC price range, and it may be helpful in figuring out new market alternatives.
It could additionally enable you optimize your individual Advert spend. If you recognize {that a} competitor is spending most of their PPC price range in a single nation, it could be useful so that you can improve funding in different comparable areas.
If you wish to perceive the size of a competitor’s paid marketing campaign, you’ll be able to examine the variety of key phrases they’re bidding on and the pages they’re sending the site visitors to.
Find out how to do it
To see this display, simply scroll down from the Paid site visitors report.
Why it’s helpful
The charts for Paid key phrases and Paid pages assist us perceive the historic efficiency of a competitor’s Google adverts marketing campaign.
From these charts, we will analyze the seasonality of our opponents’ paid search campaigns, particularly the variety of paid key phrases they’re bidding on and the variety of paid pages they’re sending paid site visitors to.
Figuring out peaks and troughs right here may result in adjustments in our personal PPC technique. For instance, if a competitor vastly will increase the variety of key phrases or pages at a sure time of yr, it may point out elevated demand they need to seize—for instance, for an occasion like Black Friday or Christmas.
If key phrases and pages are diminished, it may imply both that demand has diminished or that their search engine optimisation is doing so effectively that they don’t want paid promoting. Or it may merely be a check.
Finally, you’ll have to make use of your instinct and your individual knowledge to find out the precise purpose for peaks and troughs on this knowledge.
Spying in your competitor’s top-performing adverts means that you can be taught what’s working and what’s not. And the very best place to do it’s within the Prime Adverts report.
Find out how to do it
To see your competitor’s Prime Adverts, scroll down from the Paid pages report, and also you’ll see the adverts sorted from highest to lowest site visitors.
If you wish to see your entire opponents’ adverts, you’ll be able to click on the View all button.
Why it’s helpful
Spying in your competitor’s top-performing adverts is beneficial as a result of you’ll be able to be taught what works and what doesn’t with out spending a greenback on PPC.
Though it’s fascinating seeing the top-performing adverts, typically you need to know what key phrases are driving this site visitors and in addition what pages your opponents are sending site visitors to.
Within the instance under, it’s in all probability no shock that Canva is sending the lion’s share of their paid site visitors to their homepage.
Find out how to do it
To see your competitor’s Prime paid key phrases and Prime paid pages report, scroll down from the Prime adverts report.
Why it’s helpful
Understanding the precise key phrase is beneficial for 2 causes:
- Discover new key phrases – It could mean you can uncover new key phrases you won’t have found your self.
- Discover high-value key phrases – With paid site visitors, opponents aren’t normally going to place cash into key phrases that don’t supply a great return. Spying on their paid key phrases means that you can discover essentially the most high-value key phrases.
Likewise, together with your competitor’s Prime paid pages, you’ll be able to see which pages they prioritize for paid exercise, supplying you with insights into their total advertising and marketing technique.
To date, we’ve solely checked out spying on one competitor in isolation, however what if you wish to have a look at all the opponents bidding on a selected key phrase? That is simple to do utilizing Keywords Explorer and the Ads position history report.
This report shows us two things:
- When competitors started and finished bidding on this keyword
- What landing page they send the traffic to
How to do it
In the example below, we can see one of our competitors placed some ads on our brand keyword a few years ago.
The colored marks indicate where a competitor has placed a paid Google ad on this particular keyword over time, the longer the length of the mark means the ad ran for a longer period of time.
But this report’s strength is in its ability to show all competitors bidding on this keyword. If we enter “Christmas tree” into the search bar, we can see a variety of competitors bidding on this keyword.
Hovering over any of the colored marks will reveal the exact ad that was run. This is useful for monitoring paid activity and seeing how competitors have changed their ads over time.
This is a really good way to quickly assess the competition before you launch your PPC activity.
Why it’s useful
For quick spot checks on important keywords, like your brand, you can see which competitors are placing ads on certain keywords. Often it will be more than one competitor for competitive terms.
This overview is also useful for helping you understand the peak advertising periods. If competitors run a lot of ads at a certain time of year, you can use this information to inform your own campaigns for the next year.
It’s also useful for allocating PPC budgets. If you can see the timing of the competitors’ ads, you can allocate more budget to be spent during these periods.
Value per click on (CPC) is the quantity you pay when a person clicks on an advert. It’s an vital metric for entrepreneurs because it helps them perceive how a lot they might want to spend to draw potential clients.
Find out how to do it
Yow will discover CPC in Ahrefs by coming into any area into Site Explorer’s search box and then heading to the Paid keywords report
If you want to identify paid keywords within a certain range, you can use the CPC filter. I’ve set a filter for ads above $10 CPC to see the most expensive keywords. We can see that Canva is only bidding on a single keyword above $10.
Why it’s useful
Seeing the CPC for each keyword allows you to manage your advertising budget effectively. Enabling you to provide the best return on investment in your PPC campaign.
By understanding CPC, you can also update and optimize your bidding strategies accordingly.
Spying on opponents’ paid exercise is a helpful technique to get a aggressive benefit. However it’s value noting some widespread pitfalls, which, should you’re not cautious—-you can fall into.
Right here’s what they’re and how one can keep away from them.
Over-focusing on competitor adverts
Though PPC spying is a helpful technique to get insights about your opponents’ paid exercise, should you over-obsess and over-analyze your competitor’s adverts, you could possibly lose sight of your individual PPC marketing campaign. Attempt to give attention to getting a number of key insights after which use these to tell your PPC technique.
Tip
Utilizing the Adverts place historical past in Keywords Explorer, you can analyze the paid competition for any keyword, giving you a 30-second view of the paid search landscape before running your ads.
Misinterpreting the data
Like SEO, PPC has many metrics by which you can measure your campaigns’ success. Sometimes, these metrics can be misunderstood or misinterpreted.
Tip
In Ahrefs, if you are unsure of any PPC metrics meanings, you can hover over the text to get their definitions.
Before you launch your next campaign, make sure you understand key PPC metrics like click-through rate (CTR), cost per acquisition (CPA), conversion rates (CR), quality score (QS), and return on ad spend (ROAS).
Overreacting to competitors’ short-term strategies
With so much data at your fingertips, it’s easy to overreact when you see a competitor’s PPC campaign unfold—especially if it impacts keywords traditionally “owned” by your brand.
That’s why it’s often best to establish a long-term PPC strategy. PPC teams run tests regularly to see what works and what doesn’t, so the reality is that a lot of PPC advertising is relatively short-term.
Tip
Try not to be overly reactionary to your competitors’ PPC campaigns.
Final thoughts
Ahrefs is already well known for its SEO features, but as we’ve seen, some of its PPC features are super useful for spying on your competitors’ paid ad campaigns. By using these insights in your PPC strategy alongside your first-party data, you can stay one step ahead of your competitors.
If you already use Ahrefs for SEO, give our PPC features a whirl on your next paid campaign, and start PPC spying.
Got suggestions for PPC features you’d like to see in Ahrefs? Let me know on LinkedIn.
