How to Leverage Competitor Data for Search Campaigns

Search is a staple in nearly every paid media portfolio that I work with, and more so than any other strategy, search brings up the topic of competitors. We always have clients asking what are our competitors doing? How are they impacting us? How can we beat them? Over a decade in this industry, I’ve come to find that I usually end up doing the same four things every time competitors come up.

Maybe each individual account will get some other special reports, some industry-related trends, something like that. But these four happen in pretty much every account that we work with. So in this video, I’m going to talk you through the one discussion and the three projects that I do every time competitors come up and search, and talk through how you can use them in your campaigns.

We’re going to start off with the one that I think comes to mind the quickest when we think about using competitors in search, and this is the conversation out of those four different projects, and that’s around bidding on your competitor’s keywords and if you want to do it.

The basics of this are that you would bid on your competitor’s brand keywords, so that when anybody went to Google, Bing, any of the search platforms and typed in your competitor’s name, you would show up with an ad in that space as well.

So just think about when you run your brand campaigns; how irritated are you when your competitor shows up on your brand terms, right? That’s what we would effectively be doing to your competitors, and trying to decide if we want to do it. These can be really beneficial to make sure that you’re getting your brand name in front of your competitors. But one thing that I constantly have to tell my clients is that you cannot use the competitor’s name in your ad copy if they have it trademarked.

So you can’t say our brand is better than our competitors in your ad copy if they have it trademarked. If they don’t have a trademark, you might be able to get away with it as long as they don’t make too much noise about it. But just like if somebody were going to bid on your brand terms, these can have some negative outcomes. In many instances, it’ll induce retaliatory bidding, which means that people will then start bidding on your brand terms because you started bidding on theirs.

Additionally, more often than not, I really don’t see competitor keyword campaigns convert very well on the first touch; maybe you end up generating some sort of brand awareness, you can then retarget those users later on, and they come down through the funnel later. But if you’re looking for a large lead generator right off the bat, competitor bidding is likely not going to have the outcome that you want it to.

Overall, this is a very short overview of a topic that can be really complex, and like I said, this is the conversation portion. In most instances, I give all of the decision-making power to my client, because there’s no right or wrong when it comes to this competitor strategy.

But if you want a more full overview and more of my thoughts on this topic check, out the other video that we have from earlier in the summer of 2021, should be at the top of your screen right now, and you can get a little bit more insight on this bidding on competitors keyword strategy, and determine if it’s right for you and your accounts.

Now let’s start to talk about the projects that I work on, and there are going to be three key areas that are going to be pretty easy to outline, and you’ll be able to notice it. The first is that I want to be able to pay attention to all the keywords that my competitors are bidding on, but there’s not really a proper way to do this, because you can’t see the list of keywords your competitor is bidding on no matter what platform you use.

In the same way that they can’t get a list of the keywords that you’re bidding on, at least not with 100% certainty. But one way that we can start to do that is to utilize different tools to see what they’re bidding on. The easiest one and the one that is extra free is the keyword planner from Google or Microsoft; right now, I’m just using Google in here.

But effectively, you can take your competitors website, either their entire website or specific landing pages, which could be a good small niche option to use there, add them into the keyword planner in the start with a website option, and then see what keywords come up. See what their website is optimized for in terms of keywords. So for this example, I just started with Nike.com because it’s easy, and they are a big enough fish that they don’t care that I’m using their website as an example.

So when I use Nike.com, just the entire site to come up with keywords in keyword planner, we get keywords that look like this. Nike WMX, Nike grease, Nike Korea sneakers, all these things. These are not necessarily the greatest keywords to go after, even if they are what Google says the Nike website is about. But currently, you can see that there are 2,322 keyword ideas available, so we do have the opportunity to filter some keywords to see what we can come up with. So maybe in this example, the client that I’m working with, let’s say that they sell running shoes. So I’m going to add a filter to this keyword list, for any keyword that contains running.

Now, I’m only showing 55 of those about 2300 keyword ideas, and these are a lot more specific. Sneakers Nike running, trail running Nike, Nike elite running shorts, maybe we sell shorts instead of shoes, who knows? But now we’ve got a list of keywords that are a lot more on topic, seem to make a little bit more sense, and could be some keywords that we might want to start bidding on even though they have our competitors brand name in them.

But just like with almost any other competitor research project, as I was putting this example together, I came across something that, like I said, happens a decent amount. There’s a keyword in here that I don’t know what it means, these Fly Knit variants that they have in here, there are two of them in this list, and I personally don’t know what FlyKnit means, because I don’t know what Nike sells all the time, I don’t stay up to date on their shoe offerings.

When you review competitor keyword lists, you might not always know what they’re talking about. Whether it’s a brand, a specific product name, they might have some keywords in here that you’re not sure about. Or there could be some keywords that are right fit contextually, but you’re just not sure if it might be the right fit when somebody actually searches it; their intent might not be what you want.

So from this example, I’m going to go to Google, and I’m going to type in a variant with Nike FlyKnit running that bottom option, and I’m going to see what this actually is.

So now I can see that FlyKnit is this type of material that Nike is using to make shoes, which is great; that’s very helpful. Now it’s clear, now I know what FlyKnit means, and I can opt into using those keywords in my campaigns if those are shoes that my client is selling. Or I can use FlyKnit as an exclusion if those aren’t an option that I have available. So depending on what the keyword lists are, you can still go to Google and decide if this is the right fit for you based on what you see on the results page.

The same process is also great if you want to use competitor tools. You’d likely have to pay to get a decent number of keywords out of them. But different platforms like Spyfu, Semrush, Ispionage all of these platforms are areas where you can type in your competitors, get a list of keywords that those platforms have identified them to have shown an ad for recently, then you can weed through those lists to try and decide if that’s the right fit for you.

One thing to keep in mind is that these platforms are not run by Google, Microsoft, or any other of the owned search engines, so they’re doing their best from the outside in. So one thing to keep in mind is that they might not be as accurate. You can give it a test by typing in your own brand in there to see how accurate it is based on your keyword list, and then make sure that you just take the results with a grain of salt.

My guess is that Nike is not actually bidding on blazers the individual keyword, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are bidding on Jordan, which is that single keyword second from the bottom. So just take those with a grain of salt and figure out which one’s the right fit for you, and if you want to start using them in your campaigns.

The next area that I use is right after the keyword; what’s the user going to see? Ad copy. What kind of messages is Nike using to sell their products? Take a look at a number of different search engine results pages based on the keywords that you came up with in the first stage, and see what they’re trying to use here. In different ad copy, we have the running shoes that align with your pace, made to go the distance; they have a wide range of silhouettes to fit your running form.

Find the shoes that provide support, cushioning and stability; every run is covered. Latest Nike running styles to keep you moving forward, you can shop the official Nike store for the latest styles and gear, and then things are designed for performance and total comfort. So you can shop the official store again, get the latest from Nike shoes styles and gear.

So overall, they’re talking about trying to be comfortable, they’re relatively performance-focused, and they like the fact that you can buy things from the official Nike store and stay up to date on the latest styles.

Let’s say that my client also sells Nike shoes, we could easily also compete using the same ad copy around the performance, and talking about the different support, cushioning and stability those sorts of things, we cannot compete on being the official Nike store, and we may or may not have the latest styles. But one thing you’ll see here is that Nike has not mentioned price in any of these.

So if my client is selling these Nike shoes for less than what Nike is selling them on their own website, that would be a great opportunity because now we’re competing in an area where they’re not even trying to compete with their ad copy.

So take a good look at all the different messages that your competitors are using, see what they’re promoting, notice what they’re not promoting, and try and find the way that you can compete, be more attractive than your competitors, while still presenting your brand authentically and making sure that when the user comes to your website, they will have been delivered on those features, benefits, prices, sales whatever you advertised in the ad copy.

The last project I do is always based on landing pages. As marketers, we know how important it is to have a well-crafted and designed landing page that your users can convert on. Odds are your competitors know that as well. A lot of e-commerce sites end up looking very similar, if I’m being quite honest about it, they always end up having these different shoes and grids and lines, and you can filter. But software is an area that has very different landing pages.

So rather than continuing the Nike example, for this landing page review, I’m going to shift into accounting software. A very high-level query that has lots of competitors in that space, and it also is a very top of funnel type of search, so we can compare a number of different things. So over the next few slides, I’m going to look at examples for the four competitors we see here in order. QuickBooks, NetSuite, Pilot, and Zoho.

The first is QuickBooks, and here you can see when you come to the page, it talks about get paid flexibility, stay organized automatically, and then the calls to action are to see the plans and pricing, buy now, you can register for a webinar up at the top. But one thing, I’ll go back really quickly, is that you can see that in their site links they have a free 30-day trial, but when you go back to the website, that’s not available. So it’s curious to me why they’re not offering that on the main landing page, but they are in the site links. Depending on the industry specifically, if you have competitors that are doing this, you might kind of go down a rabbit hole of figuring out what the strategy is around that.

Maybe it’s just that they know they don’t convert people from a free trial very often, so they don’t want to advertise it all the time. Or it could be that they find that people actually convert better on the first touch if they just see the plans in pricing and then move forward and buy immediately; who knows? But there has to be some reason as to why that free trial is not the main call to action on this page.

So depending on what calls to action your company can offer, it might make sense for you to offer a free trial because, if nothing else, you’ve separated yourself from QuickBooks in terms of call to action. The next option here is NetSuite from Oracle, so this has a lot more focused ad copy; this feels to me more like a “traditional landing page” for PPC. It’s got a very short section of copy here that highlights that they have 27,000 customers, and they have this big ol form on the right, so you can get a free product tour.

The main takeaways from me here are that they are probably using some type of landing page testing software, because my guess is that they have lots of these different landing pages with different headlines and short paragraphs, which again, going back to the results page, you can go in and type in multiple different phrases, multiple different keywords that NetSuite is offering, see if they have different headlines for each of those keywords.

You can kind of decide if they think that having headlines that are tied directly to the keywords are valuable, and then you can decide for yourself if that makes sense for you. They’re then relying on the fact that they have 27,000 customers, so if you have less than that, maybe don’t put that as your big benefit statement. Maybe say something how you can compete on features or price, something like that.

Then lastly, my gut is that this is a lot of information to ask for a free product tour, also, product tour is absolutely a fancy way to say demo, so they’re just offering a demo. So if you can either have a demo that has a shorter form on it, or if you can keep the long-form, but you have something that’s more meaningful to offer, you might be able to steal away some folks from NetSuite. This pilot landing page is very simple, best bookkeeping for growing businesses. So if you’re a growing business, this is great for you. There’s a short paragraph off to the right, and then a get started option with just a work email.

My guess, even though I haven’t done it is that there’s going to be a user flow, where you type in your email, click get started, and then there are multiple different form fields after that, that you have to fill out to complete your account, basically a form with multiple different parts, so maybe this is something you want to test.

If you notice that all the competitors have these one field starts, and then a bigger form after that, you can either try and mimic that and do the same thing, or, you can go the route that NetSuite has and have one full form on the page, that way everybody knows exactly what they’re getting into.

Either way, this is certainly the most simple first header portion of the landing page for any of these different pages that showed up on the results page for accounting software, so kind of interesting that they took this minimalistic approach, while the others have a decent amount going on the page.

Then the last option is for Zoho, and like I said, a lot of these other ones have a lot going on. They still have the full navigation on the site; you can sign up now in the upper right, you can learn more at a webinar, you can start a free trial, or explore a demo account, and then they also have a chat function in the bottom right.

There’s a lot going on this page, but there are also lots of options for their potential customers to engage with them on whichever path they’re most comfortable with. So in this instance, we know now that two out of the four companies that are on this results page have a free trial, whether they’re promoting it quite a bit like Zoho or if they’re not like QuickBooks.

We know at least two of them have demos; Zoho and NetSuite both have demos. We’re not entirely sure what Pilot does because you’re just supposed to get started, but then you can also buy now directly through QuickBooks. So there are lots of different options that you have available, and I’ve only really focused on the calls to action as I’m going through each of these examples.

But again, you can also look at the layout, do they have the navigation in the page, what type of images, if any, are they using to highlight why people should pick them? Are they focusing on features? Are they very customer review heavy? What are they focusing on? Is it the ease of the software, anything like that? Pay attention to what is being utilized on the page, and think about how your company competes against those things, and then also think where do you feel like your strengths are?

Are any of these four brands highlighting on their pages the things that you think you’re best at? If not, maybe that’s the information you need to put on the landing page. Show where you can compete, how you’re better, especially if your competitors aren’t calling it out.

So just to show you in text form, kind of what I just said, because I realized I said that over an image. So in case you wanted to write something down or just wanted to make everything clear, you can look at all the different calls to action that people are using for landing page review, then what supporting information are they using?

Again, is it the same or different than what you would use? What main areas are they using to try and compete, and where can you compete? Is it on price, features, reviews any of those options? Then what layouts are they using for their landing pages? Does your landing page layout differ drastically from all of the other competitors on the page? Do you think that’s a good or a bad thing? So overall, there’s a lot that you can learn from your competitors.

The first is that you can consider bidding on their terms; again, this is a conversation to have with your client. Check out that other video that I mentioned to decide if this is right for you. But then your homework on each of these is to focus on the three key areas when it comes to a basic search. Leverage the tools that you have available, either free or paid to determine what keywords your competitors are using, and decide if they’re a good fit for you as well.

Pay attention to the ad copy that they’re using and how they’re positioning their brand to answer those keywords that people are searching in. Then lastly, what landing pages are they using to try and convert those users. Everything from layout, messaging, call to action is important, and you might be surprised what you can come up with based on just an outside view of what your competitors are doing, because you have the working knowledge of also running campaigns yourself.

You’ll never get 100% accuracy on your competitor’s strategy from the outside looking in, that’s just the nature of the business, but you would also benefit from the fact that they also can’t see 100% what you’re doing from the outside as well. So we kind of need to compete a little bit in the blind, make sure that we’re making the best decisions that we can on keywords, ad copy, and landing pages, to help inform your own search strategy and how you can get in front of the right customers and convert them at the highest rate possible.

As I mentioned in the intro, there are always lots of little one-off projects that I’ll do for other clients, but these are kind of the four main areas. If you have any regular competitor actions that you do similar to my four that are here, or if you have any additional questions on follow-up on any of these projects or anything else about competitors in search, I would love to hear about it in the comments below.

Written by Michelle Morgan