How to Find Competitors’ PPC Ads

One question we get frequently from clients is, what are my competitors doing with their ads? And while we never recommend to copy someone else’s ad strategy, we do recommend that it’s good to see what the competition is doing so you can maybe better tweak your messaging or change your position so you can stand out a little bit more. So, in this video, we will show you a few ways that we like to review our clients’ competitors’ ads and then you’ll have a better understanding of which tools you can use to see how you can maybe tweak your own message to improve your own ads.

First, we’re going to start off with Google search and the easiest way that you can start researching what your competitors are doing with their ads is just start searching for the keywords that you have in the account that you know that competitors are also bidding on. And it’s easy enough to do by just looking at your auction insights. Here, we get three different ads and for the most part, the messaging in each of the ads is different. I was honestly researching Custom Framing. I got some posters I want to get framed. I have a couple autographed jerseys I’ve never gotten framed. So, I just typed in Custom Framing and surprisingly enough, I only see custom framing within the first headline.

Second ad, I’m assuming is DSA. It’s got a very long singular headline and then we see a third option below. The first competitor is positioning themselves as the largest online frame store. The second one takes a unique approach and is really only talking about artwork and photos. So, like I said, I do want some posters but I also want jerseys and then the third one is positioning themselves as the industry leader in framing. I understand the messaging in these three ads could be different because I typed in a pretty generic keyword. But besides looking at the main headlines, you can see what they’re saying within their descriptions. You can see what each of the competitors are doing with their sitelink assets and in the second one, you can see it looks like it blends within the description. We can see what they’re doing with their call out assets too.

So, you may have to search a couple times, look at a variety of keywords and see what other competitors might be coming up and what ad message they’re using. But besides just looking at what you see on the screen, Google now offers a tool that can take this research even further. Since, my mouses down here, let’s just assume the ad in position three is a direct competitor. They’re my number one competition. I want to see what they’re doing. As of right now, at the time if I’m recording this video, you can click on the three dots next to the display URL. See the little pop up shows up and says, why this ad? And you see, it’s available in the other two ads as well.

So again, click on the three dots next to the display URL and there you get My Ad Center. My Ad Center was rolled out to users around the world in October of 2022. And you could view ads for search, YouTube, and discover. The main purpose of this is for users using Google. They could say they like these types of ads, block them, report them. They want to see more ads or less ads within a certain topic, that’s fine but advertisers can use this to learn more about the advertiser. So, we get verification of who the advertiser is. See, the advertiser has a very specific name that’s different than the URL they are using.

The best part is that you can click on the See More Ads link, which I going to do right now and here we get to see recent ads that this brand has run. You can go up and change the date range. Maybe I just want to look at the last 30 days instead of all time. I’m recording this right after the holidays and now we’re getting a better understanding too of why the URL is different than the company name. It looks like this company has a variety of domains that they’re running ads for. So again, I’m learning more about this brand pretending it’s my competition to give my company a better understanding of where we fit in. But besides the last 30 days, you can look at just today, yesterday, the last 7 days, it defaulted on anytime, and then custom range you can choose your own date range.

Since I am in the United States, that was the default option for where the ads were shown but as I said earlier, My Ad Center was rolled out to users around the world. So, if you want to see if your competitors are running ads in different countries, you can just type in a different country and then see what types of ads the company is running in that country. So now that I changed from the United States to Canada, the amount of ads has noticeably decreased but then they’re showing us a different view.

Now, we’re starting to see some display ads alongside some main text ads and there we see a dynamic search ad. Just so I can get some quantity, I’m going to go back up and then change it back to the United States. Choose this quick and then, we could look at the last setting option as of right now and that will be the Ad Format. If I only want to see what types of text ads users are running, we can filter just by text ads. Here we see the options again sorted by the most recent. So, you can scroll down. Look at options there. If you want to see what types of images they’re using in their ads and again, you can always change the date that you’re viewing it if you want to look at a specific time or if you just want to see generally what this company is doing and if we get rid of image, probably already saw it but the last option is going to be video.

Notice that these are not just YouTube ads. We can add video to responsive display ads but you can see what video assets they are using in their responsive display ads. And yes, if we click on one, you may not be able to hear it in this but as the video is playing, I can hear the entire sound of the video itself. So, you can see exactly what video assets and messaging they could be using within this particular responsive display ad. If I click back up on the company name again, it’ll send me back to where we were and I can just scroll back up and start over. If I didn’t mention before, Google open this in a different tab, so you can just click back to where you were and go back to your search results and keep on searching, finding different competitors and use My Ad Center to review what they’re saying specifically about different ads.

So, then you can change your search query, search for different keywords, see what other competitors come up, or try to find the companies that you know are already your direct competitors, and use the My Ad Center tool to see what messaging and images or videos that they may be using within their ads on Google.

Another tool that we like to use or share with clients is Moat. Michelle did talk about Moat a little bit in her video on using competitor information to improve your display campaigns. You can watch the video here. I’m going to X out of and there we see a bunch of SemRush ads. I’m not going to lie. I just came here, clicked on random brand and it just so happen to give me something that’s very relevant to our industry, and I do see SemRush ads all the time. But you can scroll down and see what type of display image banner ads that they have been using recently. As we just saw, if I highlight over one, it’s showing me the device where this ad was found, the dimensions, the dates, where it was active from what Moat can track. And then if you want, you can click on share, get a link, and then maybe send it to boss or your client and say, “Hey, here are the ads that this particular brand was showing during this date range”.

If I X out of this, scroll back up. You can type in something specific. This time, let’s look at QuickBooks. I see ads for them all the time and there’s another example. It’s just so easy to go to Moat, search for your competitors brand names and then see what type of display ads they could be running. Let’s look at a different channel.

Next, we’ll be scoping out your competitors YouTube channel and I will admit this one is rare but if you know that your competitor is do a lot of YouTube advertising, I definitely would check out their channel. Because what we see on the screen right now is something I see happen a lot. While we can’t say specifically, it’s an ad, I frequently see companies put in, this is our 15 second spot. This is our 6 second spot. This is our 3o second spot. They will put the time of how long the video is as part of the actual YouTube video title. It’s crazy. Yes, a company as big as Bounty probably wants people to see these videos as much as possible but if you’re doing really good video and you’re having a variety of ads. Most brands like to hide them as unlisted with the only way you could find them is if you saw it as an ad or had the direct URL, but a lot of companies forget to do that.

So, they’ll leave all their ad variants live and public on their YouTube channel and you could just go there and look at it. How are they kicking off their YouTube ads? What message are they putting within the first five seconds in case the user skips? What are the tones of your competitors’ ads? Is it informative? Do they use humor? Are they using fear? Are they playing on any other emotion that’s going to make the or want to engage with the video more? And you’ll be able to see it. Again, I’ll admit this is a rare option and there’s a good chance that you don’t find the videos that you’re looking for, but I have used this tactic on a few clients where we can easily see their competitors’ videos because they leave them public on their YouTube channel. So, we know exactly what they’re using as ads.

If you know your competitors are using Meta to run any ads for Facebook or Instagram, check out the Meta-ad library. The URL for that is “Facebook.com/ads/library”. Choose your country, then you can go over and select your ad category. Once you do, you can start searching for specific advertiser. Now, I just typed in one of my favorite nerd vests. Just going to click on the advertiser and then we see ads started launching in November of 2022, then you can look and see the ads that this particular brand has been using on the platform. If you go and click on certain ad details and get a little bit more information about this ad and just get a better view of what it looks like. We see the creative. We see the intro text, what call to action they’re using, as well as the particular headline and you can do this for a variety of different companies.

Let’s do one more. They’re stuck in my head since I saw them on Moat. Glad I chose this one because the ad library is saying in different regions. We have Brazil, Italy, Germany, Spain. I can view ads in those specific regions, but since I am in the United States, that’s what we had selected. I can scroll down and see what they’ve recently been running within the Meta ads channel. Hey, there’s Perna, and then we get an understanding of what messaging that they’re using, they’re creative just like we did with the last example. Again, the URL for this is “Facebook.com/ads/library”.

Then you have third-party tool options.

Right now, I’m logged into SpyFu. I typed in a specific domain and I’m looking at the ad history. Let’s scroll down a little bit. Let’s find a non-brand keyword like competitor keyword analysis. If I highlight over this one example in February of 2022, there’s one example of an ad that they were running for this specific key word. If I click on a different one for March of 2022, there’s a different ad, so I can look at a variety of different keywords and what ads that they were running for different date ranges. And this is just one of many different types of competitor tools out there. You can use SemRush to have similar features like this. There’s similar web that’s out there. Video AdValt to look at YouTube ads, those sorts of things.

So, if you’re not seeing what you want to see in the free tools that I showed you within this video, understand that you can just to Google and most likely you can find specific tools that are out there. Good amount of them are ones that you have to pay for like SpyFu right here to get robust insights on what your competitors might be doing within their ads. Again, we never recommend copying what somebody else is doing. Not only can that get you in a lot of trouble, it doesn’t help make your brand stand out or differ itself from the competition. Just use the competitor information to understand what the competition is doing, so you can change your message to make it better and stand out from what the competitors are doing.

I know there are more tools out there that we didn’t cover in this video. So, if you have any favorite tools that you like to use that I didn’t mention to help see what the competitors are doing within their ads, please share it with the community in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez