Can You See What Strategies my Google Ad Competitors are Using?
Marketing can feel like a gamble at times, which is frustrating. Tactics that seem to work for other tradies haven’t worked for you and you wish you could just look under the hood and see what your Google Ads competitors are doing differently.
With Tradie Digital, you can. We use a mixture of free and paid competitor analysis tools to see the keywords your competition is bidding on, how much they’re paying, and what’s making their ads stand out. Then we reverse engineer their success and hand those strategies to you.
As a contractor, there’s a good chance you know what your competition is up to.
Whether it’s keeping tabs on a new discount they’re offering or checking their site for reviews, it’s completely normal to stay up-to-date on your competition’s movement. In fact, ignoring your competition and doing your own thing blindly would be a missed opportunity.
The same goes for a contractor Google Ads campaign.
If your Google Ads competitors are using paid ads to direct ‘ready to buy’ traffic to their website, then they’ve got an advantage over you.
But there’s a catch…we have the tools to spy on your competition’s Google Ad strategies to see what’s working.
Are their ads offering a benefit you haven’t thought of? Are they bidding on keywords you’re not ranking for? Are they targeting an audience you haven’t spotted yet?
In this article we’ll explain how we spy on your competition, how you can use this under-the-hood info to your advantage, and what to do next if you’re new to the Pay-Per-Click world.
The importance of spying on your Google Ads rivals
Whether you’re an office cleaner, commercial electrician, or a local handyman, there’s a good chance you’re not the only home improvement business in your area.
In fact, other contractors have probably tried and failed in your suburb over and over before you ever set up shop. By seeing what ad strategies are working for those businesses you can skip the underperforming strategies and focus on the marketing approaches that bring traffic to your site and generate leads.
No matter what size business you run, or whether you’re on the tools or behind a desk organising your team, seeing what’s working for your competition can help you save considerable time and money.
How to see what your competitors are doing (with zero tools or experience)
If your competition is using Google Ads, they’re easy to spot.
In fact, you can go find some of your competitor’s ads right now.
All you have to do is search using keywords related to your products and services and there’s a good chance you’ll spot your competitors’ paid ads.
This is 100% free and lets you read their ad text, see if they’re offering anything different than you, and scope out their website or landing page to get an insight into what a potential customer would see.
How to use your Google Ads competitors to improve your ad campaign
It’s true that reading your competition’s ads will only help you see what value they’re offering in their ads and how they’re crafting their message.
If you’re looking to create your own tradie Google Ads this can be helpful, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the keywords they’re targeting or how successful their ads are. For all you know the ad that pops up when you type in your main services is getting zero clicks.
To take the next step you need data.
What is Google Ads Auction Insights?
Auction Insights is a free tool accessible within your own Google Ads account that lets you compare your performance against competitors participating in the same auctions as you.
You can compare your results for your whole Google Ads account, a specific campaign, or a single keyword. The results you get will cover 5 important data points, including:
- Impression Share: How many times your ad was seen compared to your competition
- Overlap Rate: How often your competitors ad was seen at the same time as yours
- Position Above Rate: How often your competition ranked above you when your ad was seen
- Top of Page Rate: How often your ad (or your competition’s ad) was shown at the top of the page
- Absolute Top of Page Rate: How many times your ad was shown in the #1 spot
- Outranking Share: How often your ad ranked above your competition
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How to Auction Insights data to make your Google Ads campaign better
As with most articles about Pay-Per-Click marketing, things can get needlessly complex pretty quickly, so we’ll keep things simple.
An Auction Insights report is full of helpful data, but you’ll need a trained Google Ads expert to look at the figures and make sense of them. That’s frustrating for small business owners because it seems like you’re forced to pay for a translator – but the benefits of understanding that data are pretty exciting for your trade business.
When you invest in an agency to help spy on your competition, you unlock proven paid ad strategies that help you reduce how much you pay for each ad, and increase the number of leads coming through to your inbox.
For example, we can use your Auction Insights data to:
✔ Show what device your competition is appearing on: If they rank for keywords on mobile phones you could tweak your strategy to reach more customers on the go.
✔ Show how you’re performing for individual keywords: If you spot less competition for certain keywords you could reduce your bid and pay less per ad without losing leads.
✔ Show the businesses bidding on the same keywords as you: If the businesses aren’t in your industry or niche, you may be bidding on keywords that are too broad.
✔ Show when your competitor’s ads are outranking yours: If your competitor’s ads are consistently ranking above yours, you could look for ways to improve your ads.
“Do you have any other tools that can spy on my Google Ads competitors?”
Short answer – YES.
There’s always a limit on how much information we can get on your competition, but using free tools like Google Ads Auction Insight and our own collection of competitor analysis software, we can pinpoint what your competition is doing to achieve their results.
Our ad experts use Ahrefs, SEMrush and Similar Web to see what keywords your competitors are bidding on. We can tell you what terms are driving traffic, how much traffic they’re getting each month, and their average cost-per-click.
Once we know what strategies they’re using, it’s a matter of reverse engineering their success and applying it to your trade business.
Curious to learn about our competitor analysis software?
Book time for a FREE walkthrough of your competition’s strategy
