Research Competitor Ads to Gain an Edge on Search, Display & Social

The world of digital ads is fast and crowded. Marketers have to know their competitors and their advertising strategies to stay relevant and stand out. But to do so, you first need the right tools.

AdClarity and Advertising Research can help you see your competitor's ads, monitor and analyze them, and make smart, data-driven decisions.

Here's how.

Why Competitive Advertising Research Matters

Ad campaigns don't exist in a vacuum. Whenever and wherever your customer sees your ad, the likelihood is that they're also seeing other ads from your competitors. You'll need to know what your ad looks like in that context - how does it fare next to your competitors' work?

Competitive advertising research also ensures that you're aware of what messaging, design, and other tactics your competitors are using in their ads.

For example, you could discover that your competitors' video ads perform best on social media, and you could prioritize your own video ad production there and reap higher returns.

Further, you can determine what kind of video ads perform best. Are they high-production value or are they using UGC (user generated content) in their ads?

Look at what works for your competitors so you don't have to start from scratch.

To take the guesswork out of this process, use AdClarity for display advertising research and Advertising Research for studying search advertising competitors.

AdClarity can conduct ad research for your competitors' Google display and social media ads. The app reveals:

• Any advertisers' top ads and campaigns
• Top publishers
• Ad types distribution
• Estimates of your competitors' ad spend (and expenditure breakdown)

With this information, you can make a complete comparison of your ad strategy with that of your competitors', and shape your next steps accordingly.

Let's take a look at how to get started.

Setting Up Your AdClarity Account

AdClarity is available to anyone with a Semrush account - including a free account or a trial period. After that, the app is subscription based and plan prices vary according to the tier you select.

To start using AdClarity, follow this link and click Try it free.

Then, select the marketing channel(s) you want to focus on.

Here, you can either sign-up to a paid plan, or click Try for free to continue to a trial period of the tool.

Identifying Key Competitors

Once you have access to the AdClarity dashboard, you'll need to enter your competitors in the top search bar. You can add up to 10 competitors at a time.

Perhaps you already know your competitors and can jump straight in.

If not, the Advertising Competitors report from Semrush lists websites that compete most with your current Google Ads campaigns for paid keywords.

These paid search competitors could overlap with your paid Google display and social media competitors, and so are a good place to begin.

Pro tip: If you've never run Google Ads, the Organic Research Competitors report can help. This report shows domains that compete with your website for organic keyword rankings. To use it, simply enter your URL in the search bar and click Search.

Exploring Competitor Campaigns

Once you've entered your competitor(s) in AdClarity, you can click on the left-hand tab below the search bar to select the marketing channel you want to focus on.

Choose between all channels, display, social, or video.

In the tabs to the right, you can refine your search by device type, time frame, and location. For example, you could look at your competitors' ads across all channels on desktop devices over the last seven days in the US.

The time frame filter offers options such as the last seven days, 30 days, three months, 12 months, or a custom date. This functionality allows you to gain ad insights into both active and historical ad campaigns.

Analyzing Creatives and Ad Formats

Knowing what your competitors' ads look like is a huge component of curating your ad strategy. With AdClarity, you can dive into the creatives, formats, and messaging of your competitors' ads and detect what resonates with audiences.

To get going, click the 'Compare' button at the far right of the AdClarity dashboard.

Next, enter another one of your competitors. In this case, we'll select Walmart (a known competitor of Amazon).

Hit the Compare button in the bottom right of the box, and you'll be taken to a screen with a full breakdown of your two competitors' ads.

Scroll down to the Top Ads section, where you can view your competitor ads that have the highest number of impressions in your specified time frame.

Click on each ad for more details about the ad format, dimensions, spend, and publishers.

From here, you can take notes about the ad format, copy, design, and overall aesthetics of your competitors' top performing ads. You can draw parallels between ads, and recognize what types of ads are received well by audiences.

For example, you might notice that both your competitors predominantly use banner formats, informal language, have strong color contrasts, and no interactive elements in their best ads.

This knowledge can fuel your creative efforts when you make your own ads.

Similarly, underneath in the Top campaigns section, you can see each of your competitors' most successful ad campaigns.

The ad campaigns here are listed based on the campaign landing page. Click on "View all campaigns" to see a breakdown of your competitor's campaign strategy.

Here's what we see from walmart.com. This is telling us that the "School Supplies" campaign ran on all three channels, made 2.35B impressions and cost $23.4M over the selected time frame.

Just click on any campaign from this table to see a detailed report of any specific campaign.

For example, here's the top of the report on Walmart's "School Supplies" campaign.

Then, scroll down to see what the campaign looked like with the top ads.

Browse through these ads and analyze your competitor's messaging strategy.

Assess the ad formats, design, storytelling, and more - all which can be applied to your ad campaigns moving forward.

Monitoring Ad Placements and Channels

Now that you have your ad creative research compiled, let's move to where your competitors are putting their ads.

Back at the top of the AdClarity dashboard, the middle widget displays your competitor's ad types distribution.

For Amazon, we're told that in the last seven days, 36.40% of the retailer's ads were social ads, 35.37% were banner ads, and 28.23% were video ads.

Scroll down to Top publishers and apps and you can view the channels where your competitors' ads are being featured.

Keeping with the Amazon example, we're shown that Pinterest, YouTube, and Twitch have the highest number of impressions for Amazon's ads over the given period of time.

This data can tell you where your competitors are having the biggest impact. By knowing the places they target the most, you can plan to compete and outperform others in your industry.

Likewise, you can find the underutilized channels that your competitors are missing, giving you the opportunity to experiment with ad placements in those areas and make a bigger splash because there's little or no competition.

Assessing Ad Spend and Performance

Budget is unsurprisingly a significant step in researching your competitors' ads. Knowing what your competitors are spending on ads enables you to allocate your budget more strategically.

AdClarity estimates your entered competitors' expenditure, ad buying methods, expenditure trends, and expenditure breakdown.

Below is the estimated expenditure for Amazon over the last seven days. The retailer spent approximately $36.5M in the time, and received 6.2B ad impressions during this period.

To the right of this widget, the tool gives a summary of Amazon's ad buying methods. The majority of ad purchases were programmatic (60.92%), followed by direct (23.58%), and ad network purchases (15.50%).

Using this information, you can determine how you want to purchase ads, and how that strategy aligns with your available budget.

Underneath Ad buying methods is the Advertiser expenditure trends graph. Select Impressions, Spend or Publishers from the top of the graph (two options at a time) and view the metrics over your specified time.

With the graph, you can visualize any correlations between the metrics, as well as any noticeable seasonality. For example, you may conclude that Amazon's ad spend and impressions dip toward the end of the week.

You could then refine your ad campaign to invest less in ads that appear on the same platforms at the end of the week.

Further down, the Advertiser expenditure breakdown widget highlights the publishers, distribution of publishers, Share of Voice (SoV), spend, and distribution of your competitors' spend for display, video, and social ads.

We learn that while Amazon's display ads have the widest publishers and distribution, the retailer spends the most on video ads. Meanwhile, its social ads have the highest impressions and SoV.

This information empowers your brand to make smarter, informed decisions when crafting your ad strategy.

By recognising what tactics your competitors have used to produce the most ROI, you can confidently align your own ad spend with improved ad performance.

Google Ads Competitor Analysis

Google Ads is the leading advertising platform, and it makes sense to assign a good chunk of your competitor ad research to Google search ads.

This allows you to discover competitors' ad tactics at scale and gather ideas for your campaigns.

Wondering how to check competitors' Google search ads? The Advertising Research tool helps you find competitor ads, analyze their keywords, review their ad copies and history, and explore their landing pages.

To get going, open your Semrush account and select the Advertising tab on the left-hand side. Underneath Market Analysis, click Advertising Research.

Next, you'll be shown a search bar to enter your competitor(s) and the location you want to focus your research on. We'll stick to Amazon, and center on the US.

Once you hit Search, you'll see the Advertising Research dashboard. The Competitors tab located above the data will help you pinpoint your Google ads competitors.

The list is compiled based on the number of keywords that brands' ads share with yours. The more keywords that you share, the stronger a competitor the brand is to you. For Amazon then, we see that eBay, Wayfair, and Uline are its main ad competitors.

You can click on any of the listed competitors - this time we'll select ebay. You'll be taken to a dashboard under the tab Positions, showing a full breakdown of their keywords, traffic, and traffic cost. You can also view their paid search trends and the paid search positions.

The Positions report is an extensive list of your competitor's keywords, which can give you an indication of the terms you should be targeting.

in the Ads Copies tab, you can take a look at the text that your competitor includes in their ads. This tab shows the exact ad copy and the links to landing pages within your competitors' ads.

Over in the Ads History tab you can see how your competitors' ad strategy has evolved over time. Sticking with eBay, we can see a 12-month overview of the keywords eBay has paid for and the positions they rank for with those keywords.

This section is helpful for ad research because it reveals the keywords that your competitors consistently bid on and their rankings for those terms.

By clicking on any blue cell, you can also see the exact ad copies that used a particular keyword that month. This helps identify recurring themes in successful ad campaigns that you can apply to your own ad strategy.

In the Pages tab tool, you'll see the top landing pages of your competitors, including the traffic, keywords, and backlinks per page.

These landing pages are important because they tell you how your competitors convince people to take action.

For example, we can see that eBay's top landing page for August had an estimated 41.7K visitors and ranked for eight paid keywords.

By clicking on the link, we can see the complete page.

Having direct access to your competitors' landing pages means you can take into account the layout, design, copy, CTAs, page speed, and other crucial factors that influence customers' decisions to convert.

Knowing the Lay of the Ad Land

Your competitors' ads give you a clear picture of the competitive landscape. Which can be a valuable starting point to devise a powerful ad strategy of your own.

Not only can your competitors' ads inspire you, they can shine a light on what areas and tactics haven't been tapped yet - giving you a huge competitive edge.

Make your ad research easier and more effective with AdClarity in the Semrush App Center, and the Advertising Research tool from the main Semrush interface.

Get going today with a free trial or demo, and really cut through the competitive noise.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.