How to Analyze & Capitalize on Competitive PPC Analysis in the Age of AI

Competitive research is vital for successful PPC campaigns. Use AI for insight into competitor campaigns and collect information to outperform your competitors.

This post is part of our 3-part Hero Conf London 2018 series, rsquo where we now all &;re sharing session insights exclusive to attendees until now! Have a look at Component 1 and keep tuned for part 3 to come!

What are you doing to reevaluate your competitors? Do you even know exactly what their PPC campaigns seem like?

Competitive research is a column of any PPC campaign. The question is, how can we do it effectively? Approaches and what resources can we deploy to obtain a full understanding of our competitors?

Inside her Hero Conf workshop, Marcela De Vivo, Digital Marketing Analyst at SEMrush, which makes the case for using AI to get insights from your competitor’s PPC campaigns. You ’ll find out ways of collecting competitive datato examine their advertisements and a few practical suggestions on making greater campaigns.

Making a Case for AI-Driven Competitive Research

As exemplified by Marcela, the world of search was simple:

Folks would utilize search engines to answer queries and look for certain information.
Google would serve relevant ads based on these keywords.
In case the searcher was attracted by the ad, they would click through to a landing page that would convince them to take another step in the journey.
If all goes according to plan, the searcher would be converted by the landing page into a lead, customer or subscriber.

Over the last 16 decades, this process has evolved. The journey is not any more as linear as the illustration above. According to the deadline created by Marcela, it appears something like this:

The concern for many marketers is that AI will start to eat away at their tasks. Dozens (if not hundreds) of AI-driven tools are being made every year, handling tasks from articles writing to banner design:

This provides more chance Though this might appear frightening. The goal of creating AI is to up us for , strategic work that is more critical. We could automate Advertising activities that are repetitive and put our efforts into those three central areas:

Creativity: Focus on shifting, awesome and story-driven messaging. That applies to content branding and production, not only advertisements.
Innovation: Come up with fresh ideas and approaches nobody has ever dared to attempt.
Data Analysis: There’s so much a machine can do. There’s one trait they’re directing, which you’ll learn.

AI is supposed to enable us, while enabling us to expand on the three areas above scaling and automating repetitive tasks. This includes competitive study, which is exactly what this workshop was about.

Know Your Competition Part 1: Analyzing The Battleground

Competitive research involves understanding how they serve their clients and using that knowledge to come across. Let’s begin with the analysis side of this coin.

In case you’re not analyzing your competitors, you’re making yourself vulnerable. Why? Since they know you.

Start by benchmarking your site. In SEMrushyou can do this across All your digital marketing channels:

From here, you could dig deeper into paid search, assessing metrics like average position of a campaign, CPC of a keyword along with the Proportion of search traffic that advertising is generating:

Delve deeper into your competitor’s by checking out the auction insights their target keywords for each, results. A useful metric is the impression share, which shows you the percentage of impressions a rival is generating on the SERPs for a Particular keyword:

Now it’s time to go one level deeper into your own analysis. The end goal is to uncover keyword gaps to seek out opportunities your competitors aren’t benefiting from. This is done in two ways:

Look at who’s bidding on your target keywords
Look where keywords your competitors are bidding on

This gives you a better knowledge of the PPC battleground you’re playing . SEMrush also includes a Way of discovering these keyword gaps using a domain vs. domain comparison:

Select the “Paid” keyword kind to compare PPC keywords across every domain. After that you can select an intersection form to find unique keywords and phrases to every domainname.

Know Your Competition Part 2: Dissecting Ad Creative & Landing Pages

Analyzing this information is important to fully understanding that the competitors. The next thing to do is to appear deep at their advertising creative, landing pages and customer journey as a whole. This will allow you to determine where they “zig” so you can “zag. ”

Start by studying how they interact with their audience in their advertising copy. This is a practice that AI simply cannot do (yet). It ’therefore your job to look for patterns in advertising copy, innovative and objective. Not only are you trying to find similarities in the phrases they use, but also patterns in the arrangement for every ad.

Dig deep into your competitor’s leading performing advertisements. Here, you can assess performance across both the search and screen networks:

When looking at your competitor’s leading actors, look out for the next:

Common framework: Do all advertisements follow a particular formula? For example, the next advertisements all start with the target keyword, followed by similar advertising copy:

Ad extensions: Are you currently using particular ad extensions? Which do they utilize over others? Which do they not use in any way?
Copywriting: Do they utilize proven copywriting practices, for example urgency and societal proof?
Calls-to-action: How can they induce searchers to do it? Are calls-to-action vague or specific?

Keep a note of these things to discover new approaches to experiment with. Look for opportunities where you can undercut your competitors on the SERPs. Do the same using their landing pages. In SEMrush, you also may look at the metadata of every landing page, as well as the number of instances it was seen (across all keywords).

After that, look at the granular information behind each of your competitor’s leading performing landing pages. Check out which keywords are leading to those landing pages, as well as the number of instances it appears for all those keywords in the SERPs:

On both desktop and mobile, browse the landing page In addition to the information. Assess their imaginative and copywriting contrary to established conversion rate marketing fundamentals. For instance, is visitors being directed by them to specific product pages or category listings?

In the case below, Offspring sends visitors for the keyword “nike air max 270” to a category page. This page lists a few varieties of this shoe featured from the keyword:

Even though this is very excellent practice for e commerce shops, rsquo & there; s one glaring problem: the information is buried below the fold. Perhaps removing the excess information will decrease friction, and thus boost conversions. If Offspring were your competitor, this is.

Gain the High Ground: How to Create Better PPC Ads

With this information available, you now have enough insight to act on. Your mission: to create advertisements that crush your competitors!

Marcela suggests using the insights to Additional fuel this mission:

Watch the trends: Look at particular keywords decline and grow in popularity across geos that is particular. Jump on emerging, more relevant trends since they start to grow.
Utilize the TrustPilot schema: For a single brand, including TrustPilot reviews increased clicks by 25% and conversions. Keep an eye out your competitors aren’t utilizing.

Track financing cycles: Marcela shares how tracking for rapid growth in paid visitors may signify fresh rounds of financing:
Learn from their mistakes: Keep an eye out for irrelevant keywords, especially those with a high CPC. Add these to your Unfavorable key word lists ASAP:

Here Are Some other methods we utilize to create ads that are Amazing at Acquisio:

1. Protection Against Competitor Clicks

In case you’re researching your competitors, you can bet they’re doing the exact same for you. The biggest problem here is thatevery time your competition clicks one of you, your advertisements ’ll be paying it.

You can protect yourself against competitor endings by utilizing IP exclusion. You need to locate their IP address. 1 way of accomplishing this is to register to their emails and, as Soon as You get a single, checking out that the first supply in Gmail:

Hunt for the word “received: from” to locate their IP address. This should look something

You can also use the next IP checker to locate IP addresses by domain:

To exclude IP addresses, head to your campaign preferences. Beneath the IP Exclusions section, click “Edit” and then enter each of your competition ’s IP addresses:

2. Evaluation Dynamic Ads

When dealing with products, features or services, customizing every single ad could be time-consuming. The same holds for offers. Tailoring your advertising copy for the number of days left in a niche, or copy for dozens of merchandise, can take hours.

Automate this process utilizing dynamic ad text. For example, you can use dynamic text to automatically populate the number of times left at a revenue for a Particular product (or set of products):

Not only will you increase efficiency, but your Quality Score. By way of instance, you may use dynamic text to insert the precise search query produce your ad copy hyper-relevant for your keywords and a user entered to catch attention.

To learn more, check out Google’s documentation on the characteristic.

3. Boost Targeting using In-Market Audiences

With Google collecting a massive amount of information on their customers, it’s just fair that we PPC marketers get to utilize a few of it. Which is where in-market audiences come .

Audiences allow advertisers to target customers based on their interests or behaviours throughout the web. Additionally, it gives a better understanding of search aim. By way of instance, a user looking for ldquo;rdquo & best coffee beans; will be in research mode. While the keyword “purchase coffee beans” suggests a greater commercial aim.

To utilize viewers, create a new ad group and, even when picking how you’ll be targeting customers, pick “Interests & remarketing:”

Select “In-market crowds ” from the “Select category” dropdown:

You’ll then have the ability to select several broad and interests that are granular and behaviours. For example, you may target an audience as broad as “Motor Vehicles” or become heavy as particular brands, such as ldquo;Tesla Motors:”

Make sure you layer this on top of other targeting choices (geographics, or even other in-market segments). Empowered by this information, you can serve viewers that are hyper-targeted messaging.

Conclusion

Since you can see, AI is a tool to return and mould many data points to generate fresh insights. This type of insight is valuable If it comes to competitive analysis.

In case you’re worried about rsquo, there & a robot uprising;s not anything to worry about yet. While AI can take away specific repetitive tasks, it really empowers our creativity and innovation. Before, I said rsquo & ;s so much machines may take good care of. In Marcela’s rsquo & words robots may;t possess. Your biggest edge? Placing yourself s shoes.

Image Credits

All screenshots taken by writer, October 2018
Unsplash /Kolleen Gladden
Image 1-11, 13-14: through SEMrush
Image 12: through Offspring
Image 15-16: through Gmail
Image 17: through Geotek IP Checker
Image 18-22: through Google Ads

The article How to Analyze & Capitalize on Competitive PPC Analysis at the Age of AI appeared first on Acquisio Blog.

Buy Tickets for every event – Sports, Concerts, Festivals and more buytickets.com