No business likes the idea of throwing its resources into a void. Knowing the optimal cost of context ads for your market is more practical. The most straightforward strategy is to monitor the competitor ad spend and form your approach based on this information. It is impossible to calculate the costs accurately since this information is confidential, and businesses are unlikely to disclose it. However, it is possible to estimate.
This article will discuss how you can analyze competitors using several methods. We want to start by answering a common query from new customers: Is it possible to observe how much is my competitor spending on Google Adwords?
As mentioned earlier, Google has begun to restrict the competitive data and analytics it provides to advertisers, much to the displeasure of every paid search marketer. These restrictions are part of a broader backlash against the mass sharing of consumer data, meaning deeper competitor insights are needed.
Let's say you could view competitors' expenditures for Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords). Would you like them to have the same information about your company? And one has to assume their competitors have access to the same information and resources. Since we don't have access to every competitor's exact keywords and bids, paid search marketers must learn to find competitor adwords spend.
When many companies spend a lot of money on contextual advertising, it increases the cost per click and reduces the reach for everyone. There is a danger of exceeding the budget or getting conversions that will not bring enough profit.
Knowing about the contextual advertising budget of your competitors is helpful for at least two reasons:
Find out how much competitors spend on adwords. Knowing this, you can choose from the following options: investing in contextual advertising, focusing your efforts on SEO promotion, paying for expensive high-frequency queries, using low-frequency queries, and trying social media targeting. In short, it may give a hint for your marketing strategy.
Using the information about competitors spending on PPC, you can figure out how much you should spend on advertising and decide whether to raise or lower costs to get the best results.
Since there aren't many ways to find information about Google Ads, we suggest you stop focusing on individual competitors and look at the industry as a whole.
Сompetitor adwords budget can be estimated using reputable providers. There is a large number to choose from; the main thing is to proceed based on your requirements:
- SEMrush;
- Serpstat;
- SpyFu;
- KeywordSpy;
- and others.
Each service measures data using almost the same metrics and provides a free trial, but full access to the features and benefits of the content offered requires a paid membership. They also provide helpful keyword analysis tools, allowing you to find out what phrases your "colleagues" are using effectively.
In today's sponsored search industry, you may never know how much your competitors spend on their click budget or what keywords they are bidding on. But you can learn more about how they act by looking at trends and data from your industry.
Google Ads provides an excellent assessment and comparison of your and competitors' performance. You can access this information in the Auction Insights Report's Campaigns and Ad Groups sections and also view data on purchases and searches separately. This data will help estimate competitor PPC spend. However, there is no direct way to determine how much a competitor is paying or what keywords they are bidding on.
While overlap rate, outranking share, and other metrics are significant, we recommend focusing on impression share statistics.
The number of impressions your ad gets on Google's search engine results pages (SERPs) is called its impression share. Given the rarity of achieving the ideal share of impressions, even 60-70% results can be considered a success. Increasing your share of audience attention in an industry where there are many other similar businesses can be challenging, no matter how much money you spend on advertising or what is the estimated adwords budget of competitor.
While this data cannot pinpoint specific competitor spending, you can apply it to spot trends. If a competitor's share of impressions changes a lot or if you see new competitors in this report, you can use these changes to adjust your budget or explain why your cost per click (CPC) is going up.
In addition, we use industry-standard metrics to compare our costs to the market and assess how our efforts match up. Again, it's natural not to be in the first position always. Even the best display ad has a certain share of lost impressions related to ranking on Google. However, if you're losing a percentage of impressions due to budget constraints, you will likely find competitors PPC budget much more extensive than yours.
Of course, there are a few caveats to this story. Ranking in search results is controlled by many factors, including those not related to advertising costs.
The playing field, however, is quite different for multi-channel sellers like Amazon and smaller e-commerce companies. So while Amazon can be a competitor, any skilled PPC marketer knows that their smaller clients shouldn't worry about this e-commerce giant. Instead, companies should research specialized competitors that provide the same benefits to customers but are more likely to pose a real threat.
Similarly, even though a competitor's brand receives a smaller share of attention does not mean that it spends less money overall. The amount of attention your brand gets can also be affected by the number of items you have in stock and whether or not they have Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs).
If you want to evaluate competitor ads spending throughout the whole niche, make a semantic core in advance and sign up for an evaluation with one of the providers. Let's look at the computation process from start to finish so that you can better grasp how Artjoker does things. We will use the Serpstat website as an example.
- Go to the Serpstat website for PPC analysis and select the appropriate tools. This platform is a convenient tool to guess if not to find competitors traditional Google Ad spend. However, you may use any similar site.
- Enter the search word and select the location.
- To get started, select "Main terms."
- To remove occurrences that include place names, you can use filters.
- Download the information in any format convenient for you.
- You will receive an uploaded version with a list of keywords, their current ranking, the number of requests made, and the total cost. These steps might help you find out Google Ad spend of competitor.
- We have to estimate bids because we don't have a CTR (which shows the ratio of clicks to impressions). Typical CTR rates for unbranded entries in the source region are 25% for the first position, 23.7% for the second position, and 22.5% for the third position (figures may vary).
- To calculate the cost of the top contextual placement, multiply the number of bids for each keyword and then divide the result by the expected CTR.
You can easily optimize your costs by adding up and comparing the price.
Again, Serpstat is one platform that helps you track competitor advertising spend. But we recommend you try a few various sites to find which is the most convenient for you. Based on your previous search queries, domain quality, and the total number of phrases found in the context, the tool will generate a list of relevant sites for you.
The procedure will be slightly different if you want to calculate the cost for a specific site.
Enter the category name for the site.
Select "PPC Analysis -> Keywords".
Repeat the steps from the previous chapter.
The report has valuable information that should be considered when developing a semantic core for further promotion. For example, it says how much competition there is for the key, which can range from 0% to 100%.
