Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing can be extremely profitable when done right. It’s a great way to drive traffic, generate leads and boost brand awareness. A key part of succeeding with this method involves understanding the tactics being used by your competition. Doing a thorough PPC competitive analysis is a good way to determine where they’re getting good results and what areas you might be able to improve.
Know Your Competitors
The first step in a PPC analysis involves identifying your strongest competitors. Some of your top competitors may be obvious, but keep in mind that the biggest competition in your industry may not stay the same since some companies are growing and getting stronger and new businesses may have been established.
Once you’ve identified your biggest competitors, take a look at their PPC strategy. What keywords are your competitors ranking for? Are there any key terms you should be using but aren’t? There may be some gaps in your keyword strategy, so spend some time evaluating your volume and cost per click.
Consider where competing companies’ ads are being displayed. Are they primarily on search engine results pages, on social media, or on certain websites? Using both free and paid tools, you can gain insight into your competition’s ad spend and search engine ranking. If there’s something that’s working well for them that’s currently not part of your strategy, you may want to consider making some changes.
Analyze Their Ad Copy
Effective ad copy depends on having a very clear picture of the wants and needs of a target audience so you can tailor your ads to what drives your audience. It’s imperative to know your audience, and a good place to start is by creating a buyer persona. It can be beneficial to compare the buyer persona you’ve created to the audience that your competitors are targeting.
There are tools available such as Spyfu that can help you to get a clear picture of the performance of your ads. Using this type of tool can give you insight into your competitors’ ad spend as well as conversion rates.
Consider the tone they’re using in their ads. Is it businesslike and formal or relaxed and humorous? Are they using a lot of images and videos and should you consider using more or less? How are they communicating what makes their company unique and what type of call to action are they using?
Analyze Landing Pages
Look at the landing pages that are used by your competition and analyze your own. When your prospects click an ad and land on one of your landing pages, are they getting what they were told they would get if they clicked on the link? What are the most effective landing pages of your competition?
Compare your online presence with the online presence of your biggest competitors. How often do your competitors’ ads appear and what social media platforms are they spending the most time on? What’s their budget for PPC advertising?
There are many factors to consider when analyzing the performance of PPC campaigns and it can take time to get the results you’re looking for. The PPC experts at Softline Solutions can help you to analyze and improve PPC performance. Get in touch with us today.
