Trying to get an edge up on your competitors? Below we have outlined several competitor tools that you may already have access to, and you didn’t even realize it as well as other tools across SEO, Social, Content evaluation & Email that you may be ready to invest in to take your competitor analysis to the next level.

Paid Media

Google Ads

If you’re already running paid ads through Google, then you have several competitor analysis tools already at your disposal!

Keyword Planner

First of these is keyword planner. While keyword planner is mostly used for forecasting and planning, you can also get an idea of how expensive and how much competition is behind a certain search query that you may want to target. This tool can be found under the Tools & Settings section of Google Ads.

There are two main columns that you will want to focus on when in keyword planner. First, the competition column shown in the above image is evaluated based on the specific keyword, location and network targeting options you’ve set as well as the number of advertisers bidding on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google. This column will be expressed ad High, Medium or Low.  The next column that you’ll want to focus on is the Top of Page Bid Range. This shows what other advertisers have historically paid for your specific targeted keywords to obtain a top of the search results page placement. Both metrics can help you determine what types of keywords to target depending on your paid search strategy.

Auction Insights

The next valuable tool that Google offers for competitor insight is the Auction Insights section. Auction Insights can be found when viewing either your paid search campaigns, ad groups or keywords. To enable Auction Insights, all you must do is select the campaign (or campaigns) you’d like to analyze and hit auction insights. You will then see all the digital competitors that are bidding on the same keywords as you. Below are some key definitions of the metrics that can be viewed in auction insights:

• Impression Share: then number of impressions your ad received divided by the number of times your ad was eligible to show in the auction.
• Average Position: shows how your ad typically ranks against other ads.
• Overlap Rate: how often a competitor’s ad showed at the same time as your ad.
• Position Above Rate: how often a competitor’s ad in the same auction placed higher than your ad in the search results.
• Top of Page Rate: how often your ad or a competitor’s ad was shown at the top of the page.
• Search Absolute Top Impression Rate:  is the percent of your impressions that are shown as the very first ad above the organic search results. This metric allows you to see whether changes in performance are due to changes in your ads’ location.
• Outranking Share: how often your ad ranked higher in the auction than another advertiser’s ad, or if your ad showed when theirs did not.

All these metrics can help give you an idea of who your main digital competitors are and how to further adjust your paid search strategy.

If you’re interested in investing in additional competitor insight tools outside of what Google offers, below are several great tools for different digital media channels.

Adgooroo

Part of Kantar Media, Adgooroo is a platform that will give you an estimate on a competitor’s paid media spend, performance, keywords & ad creative for text ads as well as product listing ads across desktop and mobile.

Social

SproutSocial

Sprout Social offers a variety of competitor insights reports for you to create benchmarks against your competitors. These includes comparing followers, followers gained and even media metrics against an average competitor set.

SEO

SEMRush

SEMRush is a widely used SEO tool for a variety of applications but their competitor insights can provide valuable information such as keyword rank difficulty, information on competitor backlinks, competitor ranking as well as providing visual representations of how your site is stacking up to your competitors.

MozBar

This is an extension that can be used on your browser to show you a snapshot of a website’s domain authority & spam score to further help you benchmark against your competitors. Also, it’s free!

Content

SimilarWeb

Similarweb offers competitor insights across many channels including paid media, SEO and social but what is neat about their platform is their best performing content insights. Through their platform, you can see what content on a competitor’s page is driving the most traffic to their site. This can be valuable to help inform what types of content you might want to create as well or specific topics or content structure that you may want to stay away from. They also offer a free insights option!

Email

MailCharts

Through MailCharts, you can monitor your email campaigns against a single competitor, group of competitors or the industry at large to compare metrics such as send volume, promotion frequency, engagement by day & even average discount offer.

Hopefully you will find some of the above competitor tools helpful or if you are interested in gaining even deeper competitor insights, please reach out to Anvil Media and ask about our Competitor Intelligence capabilities!