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What’s one way to stay ahead of the competition, reach a highly targeted audience, and produce relatively quick results? The answer: Google Ads.
Not only does this platform allow small and large businesses alike to reach new and existing customers, but it also provides measurable growth and ROI. The power of paid media is endless!
Whether you’re working on your first Google Ads campaign or your hundredth, it’s important to get an understanding of the current landscape. Before launching your campaign, try leveraging these three free tools for competitor and keyword analyses!
One new tool (which is slowly becoming my favourite) is the ad insights option. With the increased discourse on advertising transparency, users can now see Display, Video, and Search ads currently active.
It’s important to note this feature is only available for advertisers who verified their identity on Google Ads.
To access this tool, first search the brand you’d like to gather insights on:
Then, click on the arrow beside the URL and scroll down to “see more ads”:
Now, your competitor’s current ad library should be revealed! You can also adjust the date range, region, and ad format at the top:
While Google’s Keyword Planner is a great planning tool, it can also be used to scope out the market. Once you have an understanding of your campaign and ad group keyword themes, you can use this method to determine how competitive the bids are!
First, in the Ads platform, select Tools and Settings > Keyword Planner:
Then, select “Discover new keywords”:
There are two input methods you can use when searching for new keywords:
If you don’t have an idea of what keywords you want to use, you can plug in your competitor’s website to get some inspiration. Since the keywords are pulled directly from their site, the chances of them leveraging these terms are higher.
Alternatively, when you add in the keywords you’d like to test, you’ll find a column for “Competition”:
The level of competition—low, medium, or high— is determined by the number of advertisers bidding on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google. If we don’t have enough data, you’ll see a dash (-).
Based on the competition, this will help you be more selective with your keywords based on the estimated bids. I like to sort keywords by lowest to highest competition, and filter for keywords with average monthly searches over or equal to 100. This ensures we get the most efficient results and still remain competitive!
While the Keyword Planner doesn’t mention specific competitors, Google has another tool you can use! Auction Insights allows you to compare performance with other advertisers bidding on your keywords and is available for Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns. These results can be created on the keyword, ad group, and campaign levels.
The reports provide 6 different statistics: impression share, overlap rate, outranking share, position above rate, top of page rate, and absolute top of the page rate:
By leveraging these insights, you can find opportunities to increase your reach (by reallocating bidding and budgets) when compared to competitors.
Hopefully, these three free tools will help you stay ahead of the game.
If you’re not sure where to start or looking for management services, our Paid Media experts are here to support you!
Contact us today.
Digital Marketing | 5 min read
Digital Marketing | 5 min read
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Are you aiming to increase web traffic or grow your social media presence? Figure out why you’re leveraging paid media in the first place and build your strategy from there. Having clearly defined goals in mind will help you focus on your brand’s key priorities.
Designing strategies that cater to all three stages of the buyer journey ensures that you’re maximizing your brand’s reach. Every user at every stage is valuable—and you have to make sure you’re creating paid media content that speaks to each audience type.
Effective paid media is tied to targeting the right keywords. If you’re leveraging paid search ads to appear on SERPs (search engine results pages), then in-depth research is necessary. Bid on the keywords that are most relevant to your business to trigger only the most effective ad appearances.
Gather your team—because it’s time to start coming up with ad copy that wins attention. The key is to resonate with your audience and inspire engagement. Be real. Be relatable. And most importantly, don’t underestimate the power of creativity.
Do the landing pages on your website effectively push visitors further down the sales funnel? If not, you’re letting potential customers slip through your fingers. Optimize each of your landing pages so that they nudge users towards converting.
The options are plenty when it comes to paid advertising, including Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Pinterest among others. Analyze who your target demographic is, research where it’s best to connect with them, and then target the platforms where you wish to build awareness.
If you’re ready to build your paid media ad campaign, you’ll find that it will be further broken down into “ad groups” to ensure more effective pay-per-click advertising. These ad groups house one or more ads that have similar targets or categories. Let’s say your brand’s website features categories such as clothing, shoes, and accessories. Creating ad groups according to keywords that fall under these categories will help the PPC system decide when to show ads for these products.
Retargeting ads are bound to succeed because it’s a second shot at a conversion. Visitors have shown interest in the product/service once before, and sometimes all it takes is a little reminder to push them to the checkout page. So don’t forget to retarget and aim better this time.
In the world of paid media, what works and what doesn’t? You’ll have to run A/B tests to find out! Whether you’re testing which keywords bring more traffic or which social platforms earn more ad engagement, you won’t find out what really works for your brand until you test it.
Revisit your initial goals. Did your efforts bring about the results you expected? Tracking results is an essential step in your brand’s paid advertising campaigns. The data you collect from currently running ads will help lay the foundation for your future campaigns.
After tracking your results, you’ll be able to see where adjustments are necessary. There’s always room for improvement, so keep striving to consistently resonate and build trust with your audience—it’s how to create paid ads that pay off.
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