Tracking competitors is one of the basic tasks in the formation of an advertising campaign and subsequent work with context. The study of the features of the niche, methods, and techniques of competitors allows you to set up a campaign as effectively as possible.

Features  of competitive analysis

Competitor analysis is important because it allows you to:

• Identify competitors’ offerings and the way they advertise, revealing whether they set up context once or work with it on a regular basis;
• Identify competitive calls to action and messaging, highlighting the emphasis of the ads and the differences between the ads;
• identify what programs, extensions, and add-ons competitors are using;
• borrow interesting ideas that can be adapted to your own offer;
• determine the approximate advertising budget, which can be reduced by not using ineffective ads;
• avoid mistakes when setting up your own campaigns;
• keep your ads up to date

A self-analysis of contextual advertising should include the following:

1. Keywords that are the basis for paid traffic
2. Ad texts and headlines. Their study allows you to better understand the positioning of competitors, which can be used in your own campaign. You should pay attention to the features of the offer, the cost and conditions of sale and delivery, the presence of guarantees, promotions, and bonus programs. You can study the text of ads for a particular product or keyword, as well as study all the ads of a single competitor. All results should be summarized in a common table, which will help to create a unique proposal.
3. Completeness of ads. You should find out if your competitors use full-fill virtual business cards and dynamic inserts and if they use extensions. If not, such techniques should be used in your own campaign. Such elements may be detected manually or involving toolkit services.
4.  Ad history. Its study allows you to determine how often competitors use different ads and which of them work better. So, if the competitor periodically tests new options for ads, going back to the old, you can conclude that the first was not so successful
5.  Landing pages. When evaluating competitors’ contextual advertising, the landing pages of the site to which the ads lead should be carefully examined. You need to check their quality, completeness, features of the offer, its presentation, and distinctive characteristics, as well as relevance to the request. If a competitor leads visitors to one of the common pages, then your own campaign should take this into account, creating a separate landing page for the query.
6. Budget. The exact figures for the competitive budget will not be established, but services offer a calculation of approximate values that can be used. After establishing the approximate cost per click of the competitor, you can compare the figures with your own and determine the optimal development strategy: to use expensive high-frequency queries or focus on low-frequency, gathering cheap traffic.
7. Contextual advertising. Information about it is extremely difficult to collect on their own, so it is best to use services. Their tools allow you to highlight the types of banners competitors and sites on which they are placed.

After collecting this information, you need to compare the effectiveness of your own campaign against your competitors. It is worth creating a summary table with all the features of contextual advertising competitors, which can be adapted and used to improve performance

Keyword analysis

Keywords make up the base of paid search traffic because they initiate the display of ads. Because of their importance, the collection of keywords should be given increased attention.

Creating a full semantic kernel is a rather lengthy and time-consuming process. It should be approached with great care, forming its own semantics, rather than copying key phrases found by competitors. The words you find should be analyzed to identify basic word combinations, i.e. key phrases used to gather search results in Yandex. Wordstat.

The first point in compiling semantics is brainstorming, which consists of finding names, synonyms, meanings, professional terms, and jargonizes. For the convenience and clarity of work, you can systematize the keys found in programs like Xmind, which allow you to make mind maps.

After that, the intersection of meanings should be formed according to a certain logic, which is put into the semantic map and displayed in it. A number of services similar to PPC-help can be used for multiplication.

The result is a set of basic word combinations, which can be used to collect search results. This can be done both manually, in Yandex. Wordstat, and automatically, using Key Collector and similar services.

Next, the study of search results, which consists of minus unnecessary phrases and adding queries to the semantics of advertising. This is quite a laborious job, allowing you to sift out all unnecessary queries.

Compiling a semantic kernel, you should not add to it all the detected queries of competitors, as you can not guarantee the thoroughness of their search for basic queries. It is likely that competitors have taken an excess of non-targeted phrases or have missed targeted ones. For this reason, when collecting competitors’ keyword phrases, it is optimal to analyze the base phrases. If it turns out that the identified combinations are missing in their own advertising campaign and are targeted, then they should be added by working on their own search results.

When analyzing your competitors’ semantics, you should follow a certain sequence to identify conversion keywords that may have been missed during the brainstorming phase.

To assess your competitors’ keywords, it’s worth getting to know your competitors first. Some of them may already be known, and you can use your browser’s search bar to discover new ones. You should analyze the paid output marked “Ads” and the organic output located between the ad units.

After that, you need to analyze the organic output for mobile devices, for which you can use the ad diagnostic tool in Google Ads. The next point – the detection of remarketing, that is, the presence of Pixel Facebook, which allows advertising on social networks. The Facebook Pixel Helper extension for Google Chrome is used to detect it on the site. Google’s codes are verified through the Tag Assistant.

To create a more complete list of competitors you can use various services that search by site domain or by the key query. These include SpyWords, SerpStat, and keyword planner in Google Ads. The latter uses the Auction Statistics tool. The scheduler shows and allows you to load keyword choices for URLs while doing a breakdown by platform and geography. The statistics will be displayed by the average number of monthly queries.

information about the level of competition of the request and the maximum and minimum rate for display at the top of the page is also useful. However, keep in mind that the scheduler shows average figures, which are not always reliable. Auction statistics allow you to accurately identify competitors in your ads, and new resources can be found in the list offered. This list should be saved for further competitor analysis.

The domain of each competing site can then be entered into a service like SpyWords in turn, obtaining search terms, dynamics, and statistics for contextual campaigns. This data is available for download.

The above analysis includes indicative information about the daily campaign budgets, which are based on cost per click projections, making them inaccurate. However, this information may well be used to make comparisons between competitors’ budgets.

The next step is to check the search queries for each competitor and identify the underlying phrases. This can be done in Excel or Key Collector. In the case of the latter, you can quickly identify keyword phrases: competitors’ search terms are placed into separate groups, and a Group Analysis tool is used to group those groups together, allowing you to group them by individual words.

All of the basic phrases identified should be placed in a separate file, and then each of them should be analyzed. You should go through its search results, identifying the number of junk queries. At this stage, it should be established whether the combination is a potentially converting keyword for the advertising campaign. If so, you can collect search results and create ads for new queries. If there is no certainty, the ad can be run in test mode.

Tools for keyword analysis

The following services are used to collect the competitors’ semantic core:

1. Google Ads. Once an advertising campaign has been launched, the service provides information on competitors for a specific query. You should use “Auction Statistics” to view a detailed report.
2. Yandex.Direct. The tools in the “Budget Forecast” section should be used here to identify competitors. After you enter data on the region and a list of keywords, the service will show an approximate CTR, a forecast of clicks, impressions, and costs for each keyword, and a list of competitors along with their ads.
3. Advse. Helps to identify competitors and make a list of keywords they use for advertising.
4. Semrush. Allows you to analyze paid output, which helps to understand the promotion strategies of competitors’ campaigns. The service allows you to view keywords in different languages, which increases your reach.
5. Spyfu. Allows you to find all the keywords used in a competitive domain, and to filter them according to certain categories. With this tool, you can find out the approximate advertising budget of the sites being studied and the duration of the advertising campaigns.
6. Serpstat. Provides in-depth research of keyword phrases including analysis by URL, analysis of search terms, and their distribution in the site structure, search for similar phrases, and use of advanced filters.
7. SimilarWeb. Helps assess the quality and source of traffic by displaying the number of visits, time of visit, bounce rate, number of pages viewed per visit, and traffic by country. This data is used to compare the site to competitors’ resources to determine the cause of bounce rates.

Google Ads and Yandex. Direct is used for the superficial analysis of competitors, while other paid services are used for more detailed analysis. However, the most effective campaign can be achieved by using SpyCon’s unused keyword tool. With it, you can get all the keywords used by competitors that were missed in previous checks. The service constantly collects real search terms entered and adds them to its own database, thus providing the most comprehensive list of relevant keywords.