In this day and age, it’s quite normal for business owners to use their ranking on Google’s search engine as an indicator of how well they’re doing online, and of course, you want your site to be there up at the top, right?
But what happens when you’re constantly seeing your competitor occupying the top spot on search engine result pages while your site sits at the bottom? Well, it simply means that they’re doing something different from what you’re doing, and judging from their results, what they are doing is actually working.
That said, you can’t just walk up to your competitor and ask them what they’re doing, because noone wants to share their secret sauce, and if the shoe was on the other foot, you’d probably do the same thing too.
The good news is that there are certain methods that you can use to find out what your competitors’ secret to AdWords success is, and hopefully you can use your findings to improve your rankings too.
Find Out What Your Competitor is Doing
In order to find out what your competitor is doing to get to the top spot, you need to start asking relevant questions, such as:
- Are any of my competitors using AdWords?
- How much are they forking out to generate traffic via AdWords?
- Which of their keywords are most effective at generating revenue?
- What numbers are they making in terms of revenue, LTV, CAC, and AOV?
First of all, you need to find out which of your competitors are even using AdWords, if at all. You can do this by performing a Google search using keywords that are relevant to your industry. Once you’ve seen who occupies the top spot on the search results, copy their web page and search for it on a platform known as SimilarWeb, where you’ll get to see how much of your competitors’ traffic is organic and how much is paid.
Use Google Adwords Auction Insights
Since you’re already a Google AdWords user, you might as well take advantage of your AdWords Auction Insights report. Through this report, you’ll be able to see how your ads are performing in relation to your competitors.
Once you’ve seen how you stack up against the competition, it’s time to do some digging so that you can find some relative data. Look into subcategories like “Impression Share” and “Outranking Share” which will show you how many times your competitors’ ads show up, and by how much they outrank you. Such in-depth insights enable you to see how you fare when compared to your competitors so that you can quantify the steps you should take in order to replicate the same results that they have.
Use Other PPC Tools
Aside from Google AdWords, you can also use other tools like SpyFu, Keywords Spy, Semrush and SEranking. These tools aren’t as perceptive as Google Adwords Action Insights but they’ll still give you a fair indication of how much your competitors are spending on AdWords, how much general traffic they’re generating, and what keywords they’re using.