Are rising cost-per-clicks (CPCs) pressuring you? Do your competitors appear to own the search engine results page (SERP), making you question what they do differently? If your paid search campaigns seem to be going nowhere fast, don’t look to a bigger budget for a solution. Look for better insights instead.
Is the climbing cost per click (CPC) getting to you? Do your competitors appear to own the search engine results page (SERP), making you question what they do differently? If you’re managing a paid search initiative and feeling any level of discomfort about its performance, my first recommendation is that you not try to solve the problem with money. A competitive paid search audit is the right next step..
You might think, “If I just had a bigger budget, I could pay for all the clicks I needed to achieve my goals.” But a bigger budget is no guarantee of success, and in fact, it could just lead to bigger losses.
Why a Competitive Paid Search Audit is Essential
A competitive paid search audit can give you information that will help you improve your ads and your overall account strategy. It is a very straightforward process of understanding how your competitors are using paid search, which inarguably gives you insight into what you are missing or what you can do better. So, why is this not done more often? Probably because it involves a fair amount of manual work and some level of guesswork.
Unlike organic search, where you can use a tool like Semrush for a pretty reliable overview of your competitor’s strategies, with paid search, you don’t have that luxury. Still, given the potential upside, it’s a worthwhile investment of time.
The audit uncovers which businesses are truly competing for your audience, sometimes showing you businesses you didn’t know about or hadn’t considered. This insight allows you to benchmark your own performance and adjust accordingly.
And besides discovering some long-tail keywords you might have missed that could yield better conversion rates with lower competition, it could also tell you how to allocate your budget more effectively.
Instead of blindly competing for high-cost keywords, you can use a competitive paid search audit to decide where to spend more aggressively and where to pull back. If a competitor is dominating a keyword, but the cost-per-conversion is high, it makes sense to shift your focus elsewhere.
But you can also see how they position themselves with the ad copy they’re using. Are they using more compelling calls to action? Do their landing pages guide the users towards a conversion smoother than yours? By studying their approach, you can adjust yours to make more compelling ad copy and more aligned with the customer intent.
Key Components of a Competitive Paid Search Audit
A comprehensive competitive audit looks at many dimensions of your competitors’ pay-per-click strategies and finds the details that can inform your own strategy.
Keyword Analysis
Analyzing the keyword strategies of your competitors is one of the most beneficial parts of an audit. This involves identifying the words they prioritize, how they rank for them, and where their strategy aligns with yours. If you break this down, you can determine where you should compete head-on and where you might have an advantage by targeting underserved keywords.
Analyzing keywords also enables you to discover long-tail keyword opportunities that your competitors may not be targeting. These search phrases, which are often longer and more specific, tend to generate traffic with a much higher purchase intent and drastically lower CPCs. Overall, long-tail keywords are a very cost-effective way to drive conversions.
Ad Copy & Messaging Analysis
Looking at your competitors’ ads sheds light on how they interact with your common audience. Pay attention to their headlines, descriptions, and calls to action—do they have enticing promotions or one-of-a-kind value props?
A competitive paid search audit helps determine whether the messaging of a competitor is driven by emotion, focused on benefits, or centered on price—and how these styles resonate with the audience. If a competitor’s ads rank consistently above yours, understanding why this happens helps you make necessary adjustments to your own message.
Landing Page Analysis
Regardless if we’re talking about SaaS landing pages or ecommerce landing pages, they are crucial to the success of online advertising. After you get the user to click on the ad, it is up to the landing page to turn the click into a conversion and not allow the user to bounce back to the SERPs. A competitive audit assesses how your competitors are structuring their landing pages and what information and USPs they think are most important.
Look at what visuals they use, the potential distractions or lack thereof, their calls to action, and their position on the page. Even though you don’t know their conversion rate, you can get a good picture of what they’re doing well. You don’t need to blindly copy what your competitors are doing. This should only give you some ideas which you can test.
How to Conduct a Competitive Paid Search Audit
You don’t have to do all this manually. There are several tools out there that can help conduct your competitive audit.
- For finding your competitors, you can use the Google Ads Auction Insights to see who is bidding on the same keywords you are. Alternatively, you can use tools like Semrush or SpyFu to track competitors, their keywords, and their ad performance.
- Study the ad copy using Google’s Ads Transparency Center. With this tool, you will be able to filter the ads by type and region for each competitor. Moreover, it shows you when the ad was first shown and last shown, and gives you hints about the audience targeting the company is using.
- Look at the competitors’ landing pages and compare them with yours. Are theirs easier to follow? Do they use simpler wording to explain the product or the service? Make a list of all the differences you can spot, but also of all the improvement ideas you can think of. Then, use that as an experiment backlog list and start testing them one by one.
- It is important to conduct audits like this every now and then. Just like you are working on optimizing your advertising, so are your competitors. So, making sure that you constantly keeping an eye on their efforts will give you an advantage.
Conclusion
Success in paid search isn’t about spending more than your competitors – it’s about spending smarter than them. And a competitive paid search audit helps you do just that because it allows you to:
- Making strategic decisions driven by data rather than by guesswork.
- Allocate your budget to optimize for return on ad spend.
- Enhance ad efficiency through clearer communication and more engaging ad copy and landing pages.
- Spot gaps in your competitors’ strategies and take advantage of them.
