How Competitor Analysis Boosts Your San Diego PPC Campaign

When first starting a business, competitor analysis is part of the entire gambit of research you must do as the owner. San Diego PPC agency best practices highly recommend constant reviews of competitor strategies, especially if you plan on or are currently running PPC ads.

Everything you know about their strategies brings you closer to overtaking them.

This guide shows how a San Diego PPC campaign benefits from the competitor analysis, such as:

• Five benefits of studying other PPC strategies
• Five steps to conducting PPC competitor analysis

There’s a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes.

Let’s go!

If you want to learn how Digital Authority Partners can increase your PPC effectiveness, watch this video!

5 Benefits of Competitor Analysis for San Diego PPC

An effective San Diego PPC strategy comprises many parts — your ads, landing pages, and lead magnets, among others. It also considers many fundamental details of your target location, such as the unique needs of the people there. Competitor analysis also fits into this strategy.

     1. You Get a Better Idea of Your Niche

You most likely have competitors who are currently at your level — fresh entrants into the San Diego small business arena. They are not the ones you should be after, though it pays to keep an eye on them, too. The ones you want to focus on are the big opponents in the area.

Everything from their products to their services to their branding tells you much about your niche. In short, you see how you should expect competitors to behave and what your target market has come to expect. They set the bar for you. Aim to raise it even higher.

     2. Learn from Other People’s Mistakes

You might know from experience that people complain about the businesses that they patronize. Even large multinational corporations such as Amazon and Meta (Facebook’s parent company) have extremely vocal critics despite their undeniable large-scale successes.

You can gain incredible insight into your competitors' shortcomings through the power of “share of voice” (or plain old eavesdropping). Discover what people are saying and see what you can do to draw in disgruntled customers. Turn their negativity into a strong positive drive.

     3. Make Better Ads and Landing Pages

Unfortunately, how easy this is to do depends heavily on the quality of your competitors’ ads and landing pages, along with your current budget. The concept behind it is the same, though. Find a way to bring in a fresh or better perspective that speaks greater to your shared target market.

If there is one thing you can readily apply from what the biggest businesses have done to become advertising legends, it is that you need a good and simple hook. Similar to asking yourself how you can do better than your competitors, show customers why you are the best choice.

     4. Manage Your PPC Campaign Better

It may sound shallow or painfully obvious, but one of the greatest advantages of performing a competitor analysis is learning to manage your campaign better. Starting later does not always undermine your strategy because you get to see how and where others fail and learn to avoid their mistakes.

This is especially true when managing an advertising budget since the constant flux of ad bidding can easily result in significant waste. Others before you who have made this mistake would also probably advise you to watch out for click fraud or losing leads to low-quality landing pages.

     5. Outdo Competitors With Your Insight

What you learn from competitor analysis is a benchmark for what you could or should aim to achieve for your PPC campaign. You also see where a campaign turned sour and how you would have managed it, for example, by hiring a San Diego SEO agency to do PPC for you.

Even consulting outside SEO and PPC experts on how they would work around common issues works. Whichever way you approach it, insight (technically, information) is a powerful and far-reaching asset that you need in order to one-up your current and future PPC competitors.

5 Critical Steps in Conducting Competitor Analysis

To give you a better idea of how valuable competitor analysis can be for your PPC strategy, look at how it works in practice. You can add or change steps in the templates you find online, but the general concept stays the same. Here are five critical steps you should know:

     1. Identify Your Business’s Top Competitors

Not every business operating in your location or sharing your target market is worth looking into further, at least not right away. You should look for the ones that matter the most — your top competitors. You can find them in a number of ways, from simple to complex.

Start with doing an online search, the most obvious way to see who is ahead of you. They might have better content than you or bid better in the ad auction. Whatever the reason, choose your battles carefully to avoid overwhelming yourself by trying to beat too many competitors simultaneously.

     2. Compare Their PPC Ad Copies To Yours

Once you find your top competitors, look at how they design and execute their PPC ads. Examine their ads and compare them to yours — what makes them attract more clicks, and how can you replicate, if not improve on, their success? These are important points you should note.

There is no need to pressure yourself into making a Super Bowl-worthy ad before launching or updating your PPC campaign. It should make you confident that you can get more clicks with your new sales copy. You can even field-test your ads by asking what other people think.

     3. Study Their Landing Page Design Closely

Apart from ads, landing pages are the next most important part of a PPC strategy. Knowing how competitors drive conversions with theirs is another step towards boosting your own. Pay close attention to the layout, content, and call-to-action (CTA) and try to understand why they work.

PPC reduces the influence of algorithms on your success, so it really is just a matter of how well you know your target market compared to your competitors. If you are unsure of how to build a landing page, make it a point to learn and master it. This is where PPC can fall off, so do not take it for granted.

     4. Review Competitor Spending and Budget

Tools such as SpyFu give you insight into a competitor’s PPC strategy, including their keywords and their cost per click. If you follow large businesses that happen to spend big, this might not work in your favor. However, if the ones you look at are PPC veterans, then you have hit the target. 

Be discerning in interpreting data from tools like this because they do not give you the full picture of how competitors arrived at this point. More importantly, you might not have the spending power that they do, so adjust your expectations and strategy to what works for you.

     5. Use Social Media Platforms to Investigate

As mentioned above, customers like to talk and share their experiences. Listening to what they have to say about your competitors gives you great insight into what you can do to overtake them. Check the comment sections and conversation threads on social media platforms.

For instance, positive comments tell you what drew them to a business and made them loyal customers. On the other hand, criticisms reveal where your competitor is lacking or falls short. Use this information to develop a better PPC strategy. Just make sure that your business can deliver.

Summing Up

You should not enter a competitive space without knowing who you are up against. Use your position as a small business to your advantage. Since your competitors do not know you, that gives you have the chance to observe and learn from them to improve your odds of success.

Need help conducting a comprehensive competitor analysis? Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP) to find out how we can help.