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As a business, you should view competition or the presence of other players in your niche as evidence of a thriving market for your goods and services. Competitor analysis, therefore, should form one of your core business strategies when looking to improve systems that elevate your marketing game.
However, stalking your competitor to learn about their SEO and web traffic, social media, PPC and ads, and blog content is not a walk in the park. In this light, there are useful free and paid tools to help you track your competitor activities so that you boost your ads’ performance, get optimization ideas, and keep up with new market trends. These include:
Best tools for Google
iSpionage
iSpionage helps you see the number of PPC ads your competitor is running, the keywords they are using, and for how long the campaign will run.
Additionally, this PPC tool enables you to see how other advertisers group their ads, landing pages, and keywords. iSpionage also helps you see the ads that get the most traffic and how these ads rank on Bing, Yahoo, and Google. However, the tool is not free though they offer a free trial and doesn’t require a credit card. If iSpionage is the ideal tool for your business, you can get a Basic plan that starts at $29 per month and rise to $299 per month for agencies and business with over $10,000 in PPC per month.
Ubersuggest
If you are looking for an ideal tool to spy on your competitor’s backlinks for a solid SEO strategy, consider Ubersuggest. This tool features a traffic analyzer overview that allows you to have a big picture of your competitor’s site, including the number of incoming links, traffic per month over the past 12 months. You will also get their domain score, total estimated monthly traffic for the keywords, and the number of organic keywords they rank. Ubersuggest is a free tool.
Majestic
Majestic is one of the best options when looking for a tool that provides a holistic view of your competitors’ SEO landscape.
Ideally, you can use this tool to analyze the backlink profile of specific content pieces. The tool is also designed to provide the number of backlinks that a piece of content has received so that you know how competitive it will be to rank for. Majestic is available in a paid and free option. The paid subscription provides you with more of the competitor’s data.
SEMrush- google
SEMrush is another tool that will help you find out where your competitors are advertising. This tool allows you to access information about your display ad campaigns and search ad campaigns. Additionally, this tool will enable you to analyze your competitor’s keyword selection and budgets. Ideally, you will be able to view all your competitors’ actions and use the information to improve your marketing campaigns. With SEMrush, you can also get a list of all the competitors, including new ones and the number of a common keyword that they use. The tool gives you an idea of who uses the same keywords as yours and those you are competing against. It also shows you the specific keywords your competition bids on. SEMrush is available for a 99 to 399 per month if billed monthly or $83 to $333 per month if billed yearly.
Best tool for YouTube
Wordtracker
Wordtracker is designed to work just like the AdWords Keyword Planner; however, it features an extra layer of keyword data from Amazon and YouTube. It provides one convenient place to save keywords, filter keywords, and find the ones you need. More importantly, this tool has a useful feature that comes with a basic PPC keyword research and planning functionality that allows you to grab your competitors’ data and locate gaps and opportunities that you can use to improve your own campaigns. Wordtracker is not free, and you can get a Basic Bronze subscription at $27 a month. The Gold subscription goes for $99. The Gold subscription gives you a broader geographic reach and more search data.
Best tools for Facebook
AdLeap
Are you having difficulties determining where your competitors advertise? Well, AdLeap can help. This tool enables you to get vital information about your competitors Facebook ads, including data on the high converting ads that the competitor runs. Additionally, this tool will also allow you to pin competitor ads to your dashboard to easily make an analysis and pick out the ones similar to your style and those that feature the same products. Importantly, the tool allows you to create inspired ads based on the inspiration from your competitors. You can get AdLeap for a monthly subscription of $47 for three months or a one-off subscription of $97.
SimilarWeb-facebook
SimilarWeb is a useful tool for analyzing data on your competitor’s marketing mix, website audiences, and demographics. It also allows you to track your competitors’ premium traffic sources and referral sites to know the traffic that comes from organic VS paid search. Apart from working for the web, this tool also works as mobile app analytics. Additionally, you can use this tool to formulate custom categories and analyze competitors more comprehensively. SimilarWeb is a free trial, no credit card tool.
Best tool for LinkedIn
Search Monitor
Search Monitor is useful if you are looking for a tool to crawl your web to monitor your ads across numerous devices and locations. With this tool, you can benefit from two essential functions; Competitive Insights and Brand Protection. Competitive Insights enables you to gather your competitors’ data on PPC benchmarks, brand bidding, SERP, SEO, benchmarks, and product listings. The Brand Protection option allows you to monitor brand bidding, landing pages, offer content, FTC compliance, and OTA pricing. Ideally, this tool can also be used to detect brand violations or track affiliates. You can also use it to verify price parity for the same services or products across different sellers. This tool doesn’t offer free trials, and pricing plans start from $599 per month.
How to locate and view pages’ ad in an advertising platform
- Go to the business page and locate the “Ads” tab on the left or in the horizontal menu above the recent posts. You will see the list of ads associated with the page
- You can go to Page Transparency to see all ads a page is running.
- Tap on your profile picture in the bottom right, then tap Settings. Tap Ads to view all Ad Activity.
- Go to the navigation panel and select the Display campaign and select the ad group you want to view
Key takeaway
Monitoring competitor ads is essential to know where your competitors are advertising and how they are doing it. With the competitor analysis tools we have covered in this piece, you can do just that to stay on top of the latest tricks and tips that help keep up with your competition. Should you need help with Facebook performance and advertising, contact ATTN Agency.