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A podcast about Google Ads and PPC Advertising by Corey Frankosky from Surfside PPC.
What's up everyone? Welcome to the Surfside PPC podcast. This is episode number 26 and today I'm going to be going over PPC competitive analysis tools. So what the top tools are, tools that I actually use, and really the main main tools that actually give you some level of insights and how to use them. I'll be honest, starting this, you really don't need a paid tool to figure out to really do enough in terms of PPC competitive analysis. And the paid tools and the data they give you are not always perfectly accurate. I'll have a few examples today of like some of the different companies I've seen in the ad results and and different types of information I've gotten. But this is generally how I would do a competitive analysis if somebody were to say, you know, we want to start running ads. You know what? How do we know what our competitors are spending? How do we know what they're doing? You know, how can we kind of develop a strategy? And sometimes when I'm developing a strategy for a new client, the easiest thing to do is say, let's see what other competitors are doing. The final thing before we get into this presentation is I'm very big at looking at the overall strategies of the largest companies. So, if you are a pest control, company, you should look at what does Orcin do, what does Terminix do, like what do these companies do and basically guide your strategy around that because these companies are generally hiring the best, the biggest, the most effective marketing agencies that they possibly can because they have the budget to do so. So, they're going to say, "We're going to try to hire the best marketing agencies. We're going to make sure we're getting the best possible results." I'm not saying they run perfect campaigns, but I but they are generally at a higher standard than your local company that just started running ads last week because they've been running ads for years and it's basically a process from launch to all the optimizations you've done in that entire time. So PPC PPC competitive analysis tool is really going to be more focused on Google ads than anything. But really the main reason you want to see competitive analysis I like looking at landing pages and offers. I think it's also helpful to look at ad copy and figure out okay what are the headlines? What are the descriptions? What are the offers they're running? Do they have some type of free offer? Is there some type of promotion they're running? Is it, you know, are they focused on their award-winning? Is it their top rated? You know, you're trying to figure out different things in the ad copy to say, "Okay, this is these are things that I need to make sure I hit on within my ad copy." Keywords they bid on has been the number one thing over the years that you just really I don't really do much competitive analysis for keywords. I feel pretty confident that with the Google keyword planner, I can generally find the best keywords I'm generally trying to target. And then from there, it becomes, okay, how do I expand my current keyword list and refine my keyword list to figure out what's actually driving me the best results. So keywords are one of those I'll show you how I approach it, but ultimately it's question to answer. What keywords are your top competitors bidding on? Should be pretty obvious. You know, if you're a tree removal company, they're they're bidding on tree removal near me. So that one should be pretty obvious. Longunning ads are usually winners. So if you see a specific advertisement, and this could be found in the ads transparency center. If you see a specific type of advertisement that's used pretty frequently, then you might say, "Okay, that might be something that's winning well for them. This is actually where Spyfu can be a little bit more useful, but we will get into the tools in the next slide. So, starting with the free tools, I would say my top two tools I use the most are, you know, top two free tools I use the most are the ads transparency center. Enter a URL, enter a business, and you will find some of their ads that are running. This doesn't always give you every single last ad that they're running because this is showing there's three total ads all time. I have an example of a different looking ad from the same company. So, if we come over here and I'll do this one quickly, but I just did San Francisco custom home builder. I got a sponsored result for chrisgateconstruction.com. So, if a custom home builder who's serving San Francisco reached out to me and they said, you know, what are my competitors doing? This would be the first thing I'm doing. So, I'm looking at, okay, this is what their ad looks like. Exquisite homes redefined custom home construction, trusted home construction services. They need to complete a verification. This is the homepage. This is the landing page. So, I can figure out, okay, this is what the landing page looks like very clearly. Request a consultation is, you know, the selling point. point trusted by San Francisco homeowners and builders, luxury residential construction services. So see all the different services they have good overall landing page in my opinion and then we have a quick contact form here. So coming back over here through the ads transparency center and you know just looking at ads and finding landing pages you can find a good amount of information without really having to use any paid tools. Then when it comes to actually finding keywords the Google keyword planner you can enter in your competitor's website to find their most relevant keywords. This one had keywords like contractor website, website for contractor. So my assumption is that they either still have that text on their site somewhere or they were built off a template initially and that template was live for a while. But you have general contractor San Francisco and really what you're trying to find. Yeah, construction website design. This probably isn't the best example, but what I'm usually trying to do is find things like this where I'm like design build construction. So let's come over here. Let's get rid of our URL and we will start with keywords. and enter a keyword like that and then find okay what are the most relevant keywords for that service outdoor kitchen builders no design and build contractors design build contractors design build companies so different ones you can do if you do swimming pool if you do patio great if not then you know okay let's make sure we add these as negative keywords so good way to kind of figure out what the best keywords are to target and also just kind of figuring out okay where you know what are the most relevant keywords for my specific competitor so I actually was looking up another example that had much better examples where the searches coming in were architect San Francisco, architect near me, you know, custom home builder near me, residential architect near me. So really, the types of keywords that you want to target that, you know, you're not just targeting home builder near me if you are like a custom high-end luxury home builder because then you're going to pull in basically everybody and your goal is like we are looking for the high-end luxury market. So starting with free tools can give you a good idea of advertisers, ads they're running, you know, just simply doing a search on Google. That's another free tool. You know, dog groomers near me, and you can see what their ads and landing pages, offers, assets, reviews, Google business profile. Like, you can see what a lot of these things look like. Next are going to be the paid tools. So, Semrush is generally considered the the premier paid tool. You know, full disclosure, I don't really use Semrush. I used it in the past. It's not really worth the price to me. And I know you're saying, "Well, you're an agency. You should be using it." But it's one of those where the pricing and the way that I used it for Google Ads, it didn't really make sense for my budget. And it didn't really make sense for how I was using it. Now, when you go into traffic and market here, you could actually look up, okay, we have paid search, you know, you can see different types of traffic and where it's coming from. So, that's one way to kind of say, okay, we understand paid search traffic. This is a paid upgrade, so don't have any information here. Generally for Semrush, I find this much more useful as an overall SEO tool. And it's really for larger companies, big websites trying to target a lot of different keywords. You know, if you're an e-commerce website with 400, 500, 600 different products and 20 different product, of categories. It's like there's a lot for you to manage, check on, optimize, and really try to figure out how do we rank higher in certain areas. So, you know, that would be the number one thing when it comes to actual Semrush and using this and using the paid search reporting. So, that is Semrush over here. Keyword gaps, advertising research, most complete platform, you know, paid search, SEO, competitive research in one place. It is really good with competitive research, but overall, you know, when I'm looking at traffic analytics for, and this is the one I had is ODS architecture. You know, if I'm looking at their overall results, you know, keyword overview and and how they're ranking, it's one of those where I'm like, this could be helpful to have, but ultimately really expensive tool, especially if you're just trying to you're not doing competitive research all the time. Now, I do, but I have found that SpyFu does everything I really needed to. So, if I go to Spyu and I pull in Chris Gay Construction, you know, I can easily see paid keywords, organic keywords, go to the PPC research, see within here, you know, some of all the keywords that some of these different keyword competitors are buying in addition to me. Go to my competitors and I can actually see my closest competitors and say, okay, gener generation builders USA, but it can also help you find, okay, what are my common keywords with some of these companies and does it make sense my keywords compared to theirs? Then we have generation builders USA, much higher ad budget, prosper development, much higher ad budget. So, I was looking through a a few of these and some of them are have different keywords added to them. Green Bay remod ing.com has almost 3,000 monthly paid keywords and almost 40,000 clicks, which that those just seem like this seems like a huge number for me for the total number of monthly paid keywords, but maybe it counts every impression, but you get an idea of monthly ad budget. So, if your closest competitor is Green Bay Remodeling and you're like, well, we're spending 2K a month and they're spending 37K a month. Sometimes you might say, well, that number might not be accurate, but is there a reason we should maybe be spending a little bit more money cuz, you know, they have a huge number of paid keywords. Now, it also might be that they just have a huge market and a huge area that they're targeting. And you always have to take location and services into account when you're actually looking at how much are my competitors spending because, you know, ultimately you're not competing with your competitors on every single service they provide in every single location. It's still you have a core service and a core location that you're targeting. How do we find the best budget for it? So, use it as a guideline, but don't use it as like they're spending 6,000, we need to spend 6,000 cuz it also might be poorly managed and a lot of wasted budget. This also may be inaccurate, just like Chris Gate Construction might have been might be spending $6,000 this month and it might just not be fully updated, but we can actually see some monthly paid keywords. So, if we go to the actual PPC keywords, we can get an idea of what they're actually targeting. So, bathroom remodeling, design build firms, deck repair, I'm not sure if they do. So, that might be one of those things where, you know, you see enough things in here that seem like they're a little bit not relevant, then that's usually where you're like, "Hey, you need help with Google Ads." But ultimately, these look pretty good overall. I think you have some competitive things and you know you have remodeling architecture construction companies doesn't really give us what the majority of their paid search is coming in on but you could see what some of their different ads look like and total ads running for this keyword. Another good way to find good keywords is to say how many advertisers are running for this specific keyword. Ad history in here will give you their actual top ads. So FF general contractor what's interesting is there's way more ads in here than there are through the ads transparency center. And we can also see they use a few different these may be just display URLs but it looks like they used a few different URLs too. They have our services, they have just they use the homepage, home construction, home design and build seamless design SF general contractor. So you can see kind of what their different different ads look like and things like that. So Chris Gate construction looking at it in Spyu. This is one of my favorite tools for me with using paperclick advertising and you know it's it's one of those tools that over the years I've thought was a really good tool. At times I'm like this tool It's kind of useless. As of January 1st this year, they got a lot of the paid data back. So, you can actually see what advertisers are spending and use that data. HFS and similar web, not really ones I use all that often. Hres has PPC specialists use HFS do study competitor page strategies, optimize PPC budgets, stay ahead of advertising trends. So, there are use cases for PPC and HFS, but I find it more useful as an SEO keyword backlinking tool. And then the other one, Similar Web. Similar web is definitely more of a enterprise larger tool. But you know, one of their solutions or you know, products in here if we look at it is ad intelligence, display advertising, video advertising, paid search ad intelligence, AI advertising, tools related to market intelligence, competitor analysis. So there's a lot within Similar Web where you can find, you know, if you're looking at general contractors in San Francisco, you can find pretty much all of them, how they rank, ads are running, and get a lot more information that way. But Similar Web is one I just don't have a use for paying for it and using it all the time. I used use the free version of Similar Web a lot and they would give you a lot of information but I don't know how much they give you nowadays. The other one is going to be Hrefs and that one we we kind of covered already. So Hrefs is one that really more of an allin-one tool similar to Semrush but I generally wouldn't be doing Hrefs or and Semrush. I would pick one or the other. Add clarity for display and social. And now if your job is analysis then Hrefs and Semrush make sense. If your job is implementing ad campaigns I would pick one. Add clarity for display and social. Again, another one I don't use all that often, but you can see competitor display, video, and social ad creative. So, ad clarity, see where your competitors are winning. AI powered cross media ad intelligence platform. So, really meant for competitive ad intelligence, and they have it for chat GPT8 ads now, too. So, within the solutions, they're showing cross channel media strategy, marketing benchmarking. So, this is going to be more useful for like, you know, Home Depot trying to figure out what Lowe's is doing. You know, you're going to do it more if you're you have a few large competive editors that you're trying to say, okay, what are the things that they're doing so that we don't fall behind and so we can also see things that might potentially be working with us. So add clarity. Last but not least, you know, the most important thing is understanding how to use this data. I could pull tons of data, put it all into an AI bot and it'll spit out something to me, but ultimately understanding that like, okay, if I go into SpyFu and I see Chris Gate Construction is sending traffic to this architect page, I go and I check on, you know, what does this architect page look like? Looks like it actually is going to Chris orgate construction services, but I can kind of decide, okay, this is what the landing page looks like. You know what? How can we adjust our overall landing page to make sure that it's designed to convert much better? You know, he really has this, and I say he like I know him. You know, it's really a one-page type landing page to keep people all in one spot. The one thing I would say here is I would probably do a little more in terms of like a portfolio, like something you can scroll through and say, "This is a house we worked on XYZ." That would be the only thing I'd recommend. But ultimately, you know, if you're trying to trying to get people to be a to to go with you for construction services, I think it's an overall really nice landing page. Spy food, we could figure out what keywords are targeting. Kind of look at budgeting, but overall, it's comp competitive analysis will only get you so far. You really need to run your own ads. And, you know, you need to be the competitor that everyone's looking up and saying, "What is the best strategy?" So, just trying to figure out, you know, what is working for others is one option. This one gives you a pretty good I like this one because it gives you ads for different types of searches. So, design build firms, we have deck repair. This is probably an error. I assume their services are not deck repair. This is ad position 2 January 2026. So, this actually sees a lot more of the advertisements. But all in all, if you have any questions about PPC competitive analysis tools, please leave in the comment section. If I missed one, if you know, if you have one, I I assume there's there'll be some people who created their own tools that will come in. Be glad to test things. But when it comes to competitor analysis, you don't need 30 different tools. SpyU will basically give you everything you need. If you're looking for something a little more robust, Semrush, but truthfully, I I get a lot from Spyfu. So, thank you for watching my video or my video and podcast and being a subscriber. And I'll see you at episode 27.