Hey aspiring marketers! Today I want to show you the three best tools you can use to spy on your competitor’s Google Ads.
These are the Google Ads tools that I have found to work best for me. If you get a good understanding of how they work and how to use them, they are incredibly useful.
#1 – SpyFu
So the first tool, which I’d say is probably my favorite, is SpyFu.
The reason why I use this tool a lot is because it is pretty accurate when it comes to looking at a competitor’s ad spends for Google data. And also, the coolest feature about it is you can see the actual ad copies your competitors are using time and time and time again.
So, you can make the logical assumption that if they’re spending the most money to show this specific ad more than other ads, and they’d been spending money on it for the longest, clearly that ad is getting the best ROI.
With this kind of information you are able to recreate that ad for your own business, make it better, and profit. This saves you a lot of time AB testing and trying to figure out which ads perform well.
#2 – Ahrefs
The second tool I use is called Ahrefs, and I used this a lot back when I did SEO, but it’s also really useful for PPC. This is mainly because you can see the traffic percents that come in and you can see what keywords your competitors are bidding on.
If you plan on pursuing SEO as well as PPC then it’s definitely worth checking out Ahrefs. You’ll get just as much value out of the PPC features as you would the keyword tracking and backlink scraping features it offers. All around, it’s a really great tool and I would really recommend using it.
#3 – Google Keyword Planner
The third one is Google Keyword Planner which is built into the Google AdWords platform. What you can do with this is actually pretty cool: when you go to discover new keywords, just pop in a competitor’s URL instead. Click on the entire site search option followed by the Get Started button.
Google will then actually spit out all the relevant keywords for the competitor’s business. You can see above that we got 2477 keywords on Blue Apron. Then you can go ahead and just export this entire list. Now you know where to start in terms of what keywords have search volume and what the competition looks like.
I think that’s a great third perspective or second perspective to get on the complete picture of what your competitors are doing in Google Ads. Knowing how your competitors are tackling PPC also has the advantage of helping you get ahead of them. If you know what they’re doing then you can plan a PPC strategy which betters theirs.
In Conclusion
The main reason you’d want to spy on your competitors’ ads in the first place is to see what works. Doing this means you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars figuring it out. You just analyse the competition, find which of their ads are performing best, and recreate them.
Why reinvent the wheel? If your competitors have already spent thousands of dollars figuring out what works, leverage that data to make your own campaigns perform better.
Hopefully at least one of these tools can help you to improve your approach to PPC. If they don’t and you think you’ll need a professional’s touch, book a call with us.
Make sure you check out the video which accompanies this blog post!