Anna VintsevskaSome marketers argue that it is the most challenging part of setting up a campaign. Some say it is the most critical and the most complex aspect of launching the new campaign. We are talking about competitive ad tracking. But here’s the good news: tracking isn’t as complex as it seems. We are here to put your worries at ease.
This article will simplify ad tracking and break down the essentials. You’ll gain a clear overview of what to consider when conducting competitive ad monitoring, which metrics to focus on, and what essential steps to make to ensure a high impact from your competitive ad tracking efforts. By the end of this post, you'll feel far more familiar and comfortable with tracking.
What is competitor ads analysis?
Competitor ads analysis involves researching and identifying advertisements from other companies in your industry that offer similar products or services. This process includes in-depth research and assessment of the marketing strategies used by key competitors in their marketing efforts. Through this analysis, you can evaluate their strengths, weaknesses, and any gaps in their approach. Leveraging these insights allows you to craft a strong, unique business strategy that seizes opportunities your competitors may have overlooked.
Why is competitor ads analysis important?
To stay ahead of your competition ads and secure a leading position in your industry, it’s crucial to learn and adapt more quickly than they do. Conducting competitor ad analysis gives you a competitive advantage by enabling you to improve your products, services, and marketing strategies for business growth. By examining your competitors' advertising methods, you can establish a distinct brand presence. This approach helps you target underserved markets, adopt best practices, and steer clear of pitfalls encountered by others.
Here are the key benefits of competitor ad analysis:
Highlights your product’s unique value and differentiators.
Reveals successful and weak areas in competitors’ ads, empowering you to create campaigns that exceed industry standards.
Uncovers market opportunities and inspires innovative marketing strategies your competitors haven’t pursued.
Provides insight into customer perceptions of competitors’ offerings, allowing you to address unmet needs.
Establishes benchmarks for measuring your business growth.
Illuminates potential challenges your competitors face, helping you anticipate market shifts, threats, and pitfalls to avoid.
What you need to pay attention to in analyzing competitor advertising
Competitor ad analysis also serves as a benchmark, allowing you to evaluate your advertising strengths and weaknesses to refine your marketing strategy. Conducting this analysis regularly helps you stay aware of market trends and new industry players and reinforces your competitor advertising monitoring.
Feature matrix
Start by compiling a comprehensive list of features offered by your competitors across their products and services. This feature matrix should capture the functionality, benefits, and unique offerings each competitor provides. Store this data in a structured competitor insights spreadsheet, which will allow you to compare companies effectively and highlight gaps or areas of potential advantage in your own offerings. A clear matrix helps you visualize where your product stands in comparison and can inform your development and innovation strategies.
Market share percentage
Understanding the competitive landscape involves identifying the primary players and their market shares within your niche. This analysis reveals which companies dominate and how much influence each competitor holds. Be sure to account for larger competitors—even if they don’t align precisely with your niche—since their successes, product iterations, and occasional missteps can provide valuable lessons. By keeping an eye on market share fluctuations, you’ll better understand consumer trends and where opportunities for growth lie.
Pricing
Analyze the pricing structures and strategies that your competitors use for their products and services. Consider where each competitor positions itself on the spectrum from affordability to premium quality, and assess how this aligns with their brand identity and target market. Are they adopting a low-cost, high-volume approach, or are they charging a premium for exclusive quality? Understanding these nuances allows you to strategically position your own pricing to meet or exceed customer expectations while maintaining a competitive edge.
Marketing
Investigate the full scope of marketing tactics employed by your competitors. This includes reviewing their websites, social media profiles, and email marketing, as well as any SEO and SEM strategies they employ. Look at the types of advertisements they’re running, their messaging, visual branding, and the platforms they prioritize. Evaluate any active campaigns to see how they engage their audience and drive traffic. This insight will reveal trends in marketing channels and content themes and may uncover new marketing avenues for your business to explore.
Differentiators
Determine the unique selling propositions (USPs) your competitors leverage to stand out in the market. These differentiators might include product innovations, exceptional customer service, or exclusive partnerships. Pay attention to how competitors communicate these unique aspects—whether through branding, messaging, or customer engagement. Understanding these USPs helps you refine your own positioning and identify opportunities to emphasize your distinct qualities.
Strengths
Identify the strengths of each competitor by evaluating their standout features and capabilities. Look for areas where they excel, such as product quality, customer satisfaction, or brand visibility. Customer reviews and testimonials can be particularly insightful, offering a snapshot of the aspects customers value most. By acknowledging competitors’ strengths, you can better understand the expectations within your industry and areas where you may need to enhance your own offerings.
Weaknesses
Assess your competitors’ weaknesses to uncover areas where you may gain a competitive advantage. These could include lackluster customer support, inadequate social media engagement, slow website performance, or an underwhelming online shopping experience. By identifying these gaps, you gain insight into where your brand can outperform and attract customers dissatisfied with competitors.
Geography
Explore the geographical regions where your competitors operate, including physical locations and online markets. This analysis will help you understand each competitor’s market reach and whether they focus on brick-and-mortar stores, online sales, or a mix of both. Identifying geographical coverage can also provide insights into regions where your company could expand or dominate more effectively.
Work culture
Gather information on the work culture and organizational objectives of each competitor. Consider elements such as employee satisfaction, management style, and whether they’re a startup or an established company. Websites like Glassdoor or LinkedIn can offer insights into employee reviews and company culture. By learning from your competitors’ workplace environments, you can cultivate a healthy and productive atmosphere within your organization, which often translates into higher employee satisfaction and productivity.
Customer reviews
Customer reviews provide critical insights into the perceived strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Focus on ratings across the spectrum—from 5-star reviews that highlight strengths, to 1-star reviews revealing common frustrations, to 3-star reviews, which often provide balanced and constructive feedback. This feedback allows you to spot recurring issues or popular features that matter to your target audience, enabling you to align your product and customer service approach more closely with their needs.
How to do competitor ads analysis: 5 main steps
The five steps below create a comprehensive framework to help you monitor adwords competitors. These steps are quite universal, though certain peculiarities of your niche might call for alterations in the process. However, a reliable AdTech partner can help you customize the approach to match the needs of your business.
Identify your competitors
Begin by identifying who your main competitors are. Remember, there are distinct types of competitors:
Direct competitors: Those offering the same product or service meeting customer needs.
Indirect competitors: Businesses offering a different product or service but still meeting a similar need.
Perceived/replacement competitors: Businesses with a different product or service that, while not directly meeting the same need, are similar enough to serve as alternatives from your audience’s perspective.
To identify the competitors and begin the competitive advertising tracking, use Google to search for the products and services you offer, reviewing both local and general results. Also, search your business name to see if others are bidding on it via Google Ads. Leverage competitive analysis tools like Semrush or Ahrefs, which offer freemium or free trial versions suitable for initial research. Ask your customers which other options they considered before choosing your business. Collect as many potential competitors as possible, then categorize them into groups for a clear overview.
Identify your competitors’ product offerings
It’s not enough to simply know that a competitor offers something similar. You need to learn how to spy on competitors' ads. Spend time exploring their website to understand exactly what they offer. Many businesses have multiple products or services, but often there’s one primary offering that drives their business. Identify this main product or service, as well as any significant secondary offerings. For retail businesses with extensive product lines, try to identify their best sellers.
How do you identify your competitors’ products and services?
Think like a customer: Visit their product and pricing pages, ask questions via live chat, or even call for more information.
Read customer reviews: Note any products or services frequently mentioned, as well as those that go unmentioned.
Analyze packages and pricing: Compare how your offerings measure up against theirs at similar price points. For instance, a competitor might offer similar features to yours but within a much higher-priced package.
Identify your competitors’ target audience
While your competitors likely share a similar audience, every audience has distinct nuances worth exploring. It's essential to go beyond demographics and identify the specific personas your competitors are targeting.
Check testimonials and case studies on their website: These often reveal insights about the product’s end users, including their occupations.
Review websites: These provide a deeper understanding of customer pain points and expectations, often revealing details about their lifestyle (for B2C) or work style (for B2B).
Analyze social media profiles: By examining the content and ads, you can discern the tone, copy, and imagery used to target specific personas. Also, see which followers engage most frequently with their posts for more clues.
Analyze their positioning and messaging
Every business, even within the same industry, has its unique positioning and messaging. Understanding this is essential for defining your competitive position and messaging. Do the following as a part of your competitive ad tracking process:
Examine business descriptions: These often condense a brand’s key messages. Check for these descriptions on business listings, social profiles, and review sites.
Review soft skill content: Look at their core values, “About Us” page, and any mission statements, which reveal key aspects of their brand positioning.
Read press releases: These often highlight a company's messaging and stance within the industry. Check local media and online press release sites.
Subscribe to newsletters or blogs: Regularly skimming their emails or blog posts helps you identify recurring themes and core messaging over time.
Together with other website copy analyzed in earlier steps, this should give you a solid idea of your competitors' primary features, benefits, and unique selling propositions.
Summarize your findings with a SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis is an effective way to organize and visualize the insights from your competitive research. SWOT stands for:
Strengths: What the business excels at.
Weaknesses: Areas in need of improvement.
Opportunities: External factors that could offer a competitive edge.
Threats: External factors that could create challenges.
Conduct a SWOT analysis for both your company and your competitors. To get started, use our SWOT analysis guide and template, and review some SWOT examples for added inspiration.
Choose TeqBlaze as your trusted AdTech partner
TeqBlaze is a trusted partner in custom AdTech solutions, specializing in programmatic advertising to meet diverse business needs. We offer customized programmatic platforms tailored to help businesses manage, optimize, and scale their ad operations effectively, not only search ads competitors. Additionally, our white-label solutions enable companies to brand and personalize their media-buying and media-selling technologies, including demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs).
With over a decade of industry experience and a skilled team of programmatic experts, TeqBlaze has partnered with various businesses to build platforms that fuel growth in online advertising and marketing. Here are a couple of examples of our success stories.
Navigating changes in Google’s Ad Manager auction strategy
By adopting TeqBlaze’s white-label SSP and Ad Exchange, the partner was able to regain control over their ad revenue streams. The transition allowed them to optimize their ad inventory management and improve their overall monetization strategy, leading to significant financial benefits. TeqBlaze’s platform provided the partner with advanced tools for better demand management and increased competition for their ad inventory. This resulted in higher fill rates and improved ad yields.
Custom programmatic ecosystem for a startup
The case study on TeqBlaze’s website details how a startup leveraged TeqBlaze’s white-label SSP and DSP bundle to create a custom programmatic ecosystem. This solution enabled the startup to achieve advanced contextual targeting and significantly improve its ad operations. By utilizing TeqBlaze’s technology, the startup was able to handle over 1 billion impressions and saw a 10x increase in income. The platform’s flexibility and scalability were crucial in meeting the startup’s business goals and adapting to its growing needs.
TeqBlaze’s white-label solutions provided the startup with the tools needed to manage their ad inventory effectively and optimize their ad campaigns. This partnership showcases the benefits of using TeqBlaze’s customizable and scalable ad tech solutions for startups looking to establish a strong presence in the digital advertising space.
Final word
Competitive ad tracking provides insights into your competitors and highlights areas where your brand can stand out. Once you’ve conducted a thorough competitive ad analysis, use the insights and best practices to refine your overall marketing strategy. Apply your new knowledge to create a unique brand presence and deliver more value to your customers.
All that will be easier with a reliable AdTech partner at your side. TeqBlaze’s offerings support multiple digital channels, from display advertising and native ads to mobile banners, in-app ads, video, audio, in-game, and digital out-of-home advertising. You can already tell that those services will be useful whether you are trying to track competitors' display ads or leverage advanced targeting and user insights to maximize ad revenue – we do it all.
