How To Research PPC Competitors Like A Pro?

SEMrush Review

PPC Research is a crucial step to the advertising success of any business online. Whether it’s for your very own or your clients’ business, knowing your competitors’ strategies is very crucial. If you are able to know how the competitors in the given industry are doing and what are the things making them succeed, you can align your strategies accordingly. It will enable you to increase your Returns On Investment (ROI) dramatically.

John Wanamaker, one of the pioneers of modern advertising once said –

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

This statement describes the real pain of all marketers who are still not collecting and acting upon the valuable data; the data related to the past and present performance of their marketing strategies and that of their competitors’ businesses.

Today’s marketing needs a data-driven approach. And for this reason, being able to do the PPC research like a pro is very important.

Imagine if you get to know what exactly is working the best for your business and what’s falling flat and only draining your budgets? How much is your competitor spending on Google Ads (AdWords)? What if you could see what’s making for your competitors grow and where are the opportunities that you can seize, act upon, and get ahead?

Luckily, it’s possible and is already being used by many businesses and marketers who you have known growing online.

The tool that lets you actually do it all and spy on your competitors is – SEMrush.

So, what is SEMrush exactly? How can it help you improve your digital marketing performance?

SEMrush is a robust digital marketing research tool which helps marketers turn insights into action. It presents to you the hidden gems of your competitors’ success stories. It’s not only a Google AdWords competitor analysis tool but much more.

An overview of PPC Research With SEMrush

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SEMrush’s competitive intelligence will help you improve your overall ROI from your entire digital marketing efforts. How?

By giving you insights into your competitors’ PPC campaigns performance. Simply enter the website address (URL) of your competitor’s domain and SEMrush will tell you –

  1. About their average monthly budgets,
  2. Paid and Organic search traffic volume,
  3. Their estimated traffic worth
  4. Number of keywords, their actual search volumes, and the keywords being used,
  5. Ad positions and their fluctuations over time
  6. CPC estimates,
  7. What keywords are driving traffic and up to what percentage of the total,
  8. Landing page URLs,
  9. Ad copies, and their change history
  10. Use of subdomains in advertising
  11. Preview in actual Google Search Result Page
  12. PLA (Shopping Ads) overview
  13. Video Ads overview
  14. Display (GDN) Advertising
  15. And much more…

Don’t take my word for it. Let me take you the actual interface of SEMrush’s PPC Research tool.

As you can see in the image below, it shows PPC Traffic overview of Themeforest.net. According to the live data of SEMrush from USA datacenter, Themeforest.net is being advertised for 943 keywords in Google Search Ads and it generates about 6000 traffic volume at the cost of $8000 USD.

semrush ppc research overview

PPC Keywords Overview: 

Talking about keywords, you can get a complete overview of PPC keywords for any of your competitors. Let’s see what keywords are Envato using to advertise themeforest.net in the USA’s Google search…

semrush paid keywords report

Ad Copies Overview: 

It’s one of my favourites. You don’t actually need to search Google to find out ad copies of your or your clients’ competitors. It’s very useful when you want to check the PPC ad copies of a business from a different country than you are residing in.

As you already know if an advertiser has set up strict location settings for their ads with Google Ads, you won’t be able to view their ads without physically being in that country. You will need a VPN connection for that country to view their ads. SEMrush takes this pain away and makes it immensely easy to check any advertisers’ PPC ad copies with some simple clicks.

check competitors' ppc ad copies

Historic Ad Copies: 

Want to know what ad copies did your competitors’ use last month or last year? And how often they changed their PPC ad copies? What did they focus more on? What offers or discounts they advertised with PPC?

Thanks to SEMrush, you can steal it all. And best of all, you can export these data to Excel and CSV format. So, if you would like to make few updates and do the bulk upload through AdWords Editor or browser interface, you can save hours using this amazing feature.

Country Specific Data:

SEMrush offers data from 115 different countries separately. It means you can get country specific budgets, keywords, ad copies, and all other insights for any competitor.

semrush country database

Live and Historical Data: 

The data you are presented with is live and fresh. However, if you want to check historic data, it’s possible.

semrush live data

Display AdVertising Research:

PPC Competition research with SEMrush is not limited to text ads only, you can also dig into display advertising on Google Display Network (GDN). You can check display ads of your competitors, know the websites where those ads are appearing, and can also check mobile specific ads.

Watch this small video below to take a walk into the display advertising research interface and options in SEMrush dashboard

Youtube Video Advertising Competition Research:

This feature was launched last year by SEMrush and is still in its beta. The supported countries at the moment are USA and UK.

video-advertising semrush researh

Google Shopping Campaigns (PLA) Research:

Wondering how to optimise your Google shopping campaigns to make them perform at their best?

The first thing to start with is to analyse what search terms your competitors’ ads are appearing on, how often, and what’s the cost that they are paying?

SEMrush allows you to do research on Google shopping campaigns’ performance of a website. It’s one feature that’s not supported by any other tool at the moment.

So, if you running an e-commerce business or offering digital marketing services to a client, you can’t actually do without insights that SEMrush PLA research offers.

google shopping research semrush

It also gives you competitors list for Google shopping ads. It means you can have useful insights about any e-commerce business offerings.

pla competitors semrush

PLA (AdWords Shopping Ads) samples: Check the actual product listing ads of your competitors.

pla-ad copies overview semrush

To sum up, SEMrush is one of crucial digital marketing research and analysis tools that no successful online business today can do without.

Why take my words, test it yourself. Sign up and get a free trial of SEMrush PPC research tool today and make your online marketing efforts more rewarding.

SEMrush

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