“Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.” – Bill Gates.
It doesn’t matter if you are a seasoned campaigner or just getting started, understanding how to beat the competition on Google Ads is vital to sustaining your business in the long run. Outranking your competition is not about outspending them, but rather outsmarting them.
You can’t survive in the digital landscape by acting like an Ostrich and burying your head deep into the ground. If you want to succeed with Google Ads advertising, you need to understand your competition and adjust your campaign to stay ahead of them.
There are various aspects of competitor Google Ads analysis that need to be done like their estimated budget, search impression share, ad position, aggression with ads etc.
Table of contents:
- Know your competition first
- Get an estimate of your competition’s Google Ads budget
- Allocate healthy Google Ads budget
- Create a good campaign structure
- Choose keywords that convert
- Write ad copy that connects
- Make Google Insights your friend
- Have compelling deals or offers
- Bidding Strategy – Utilise modern and classic to your advantage
- Provide the best landing page experience
- Embrace changes – Research & Development
- Regularly monitor your data against the competition
- FAQ
Let’s explore how you can achieve that.
Know your competition first
Many successful football franchises have a dedicated team to study the opponent before the game. They analyse the other team’s strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and key players. This understanding helps them create a game plan to anticipate their moves, exploit gaps, and counter strengths.
Likewise, in a digital world, understanding your competition gives you the edge to develop a winning strategy and outperform them. You need to act like a spy to understand:
- Things working in their favour
- Their Unique Selling Proposition(USP)
- Their bidding strategy and how often it changes
- How are they positioning themselves in the market
- Gaps in their campaign which you can take advantage of
- Target keywords being used by them
You can easily identify your competition by searching for keywords related to your business and observing which companies are running ads for those terms. Industry tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs, can also be leveraged to identify your top competitors and analyse their SEO strategies.
Once you have collected this information, you can identify opportunities that your competitors are capitalising on, as well as opportunities they are overlooking.
Get an estimate of your competition’s Google Ads budget
Now you must be wondering: How to find out competitors Google Ads budget?
While there is no direct way to find your competitor’s Google Ads budget, you can estimate it using various signals such as how aggressive are they with advertising, search impression share, or their ad rank.
Let’s understand how knowing your competitors’ budget in Google Ads can provide strategic advantages.
| # | Focus Area | How can it help? |
|
1 |
Budget Optimisation |
If your competitors are significantly outspending you, consider increasing your budget to remain competitive or explore more cost-efficient strategies. |
|
2 |
Bidding Strategies | If your competitors bid aggressively on certain keywords, you can focus on less competitive keywords relevant to your campaign. |
|
3 |
Identifying Opportunities | By analysing your competitors’ spending patterns, you can take advantage of areas where they spend less – such as social media, specific keywords, or particular ad formats. |
|
4 |
Benchmarking Performance | You can compare your ad spend and ROI to industry standards and adjust your budget allocation and strategies accordingly. |
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5 |
Adapting to Market | If a competitor suddenly increases their budget, it might indicate a new campaign or product launch, suggesting you adjust your campaign to counter its impact. |
Allocate healthy Google Ads budget
Allocating an appropriate budget for your Google Ad can be tricky, especially when you are an emerging market player. However, this is an investment you need to make to compete with other players and get traction for your campaign.
Here’s how a healthy budget can influence your campaign:
- Visibility: A well-funded campaign ensures your ad is visible to a larger audience. This increases the chances of reaching potential customers searching for products or services similar to yours.
- Competitive Edge: In competitive markets, having a sufficient budget allows you to bid on high-value keywords and outbid competitors. This can help you maintain top rankings in the search results.
- Data Insights: With a larger budget, you can gather more data on your ad performance. This data can provide valuable insights for optimising your campaigns, understanding customer behaviour, and making informed decisions.
- Flexibility: A healthy budget allows you to test different ad versions, keywords, and bidding strategies. This experimentation can lead to discovering more effective approaches and improving overall campaign performance.
Learn more about Google Ads budget set up tips to correctly allocate the budget.
Create a good campaign structure
Sometimes it’s not practical to outspend larger competitors in budget. In these situations, improving your Quality Score can be more effective, as Google favors ads with higher relevancy. Quality Score is closely coupled to your campaign structure.
Let’s assume that you are a company selling shoes across various categories and you run the following 3 campaigns:
- Men’s Shoes
- Women’s Shoes
- Kid’s Shoes
Now this is how you can structure Google Ads campaign:
As evident in the above chart, a well-organised campaign structure helps you avoid keyword duplication while ensuring greater relevance to users’ search intent, which boosts your Quality Score.
By adopting the best practices for structuring your campaign, you can beat your competition without having to bid aggressively for keywords.
Choose keywords that convert
Choosing the right keywords for Google Ads is a blend of art and science. By understanding your audience, analysing competitors, and considering search intent, you can develop a keyword strategy that drives traffic and converts visitors into customers.
Use tools such as Google Keyword Planner to research new keywords related to your business, estimate the searches they receive, and determine the cost of targeting them.
Let’s say you are in the business of selling environment-friendly water bottles facing tough competition. It would be foolish to use a generic keyword such as “water bottles” that will drive a lot of irrelevant traffic and add to your spending. Instead, the phrase “eco-friendly water bottles” in your keywords can be a better choice.
Here’s where a more targeted approach could make the difference:
Instead of broad terms, use specific keywords like “BPA-free” or “reusable water bottles for kids.” These phrases can strike the perfect balance—decent search volume with less competition. This, in turn, can attract a more relevant audience to boost your campaign’s performance.
Write ad copy that connects
What comes to your mind when you hear – “Just do it!”
Instantly, you think of Nike—a brand that has mastered connecting with its audience through powerful, memorable ad copy. Crafting ad copy that resonates with your audience isn’t just about selling a product; it’s about creating an emotional connection.
Effective ad copy can be the difference between a potential customer scrolling past or stopping to engage, making it a critical tool for driving conversions and building brand loyalty. To make that happen, your ad should be able to connect with your customer’s needs, desires, and pain points.
Doing this creates a bond that makes your audience more likely to choose your product or service over competitors.
“The secret to writing persuasive, authentic, and high-converting copy is making it about your reader. Too often, brands talk about themselves in copy. It has to be about the customer!” – Eddie Shleyner, Founder of VeryGoodCopy
Read this article for some examples of effective ad copy from the industry.
Make Google Insights your friend
Google Ads Auction Insights tool enables you to compare your ad performance against competitors in the same auction. This way you can identify your competitors across specific keywords, ad groups, or campaigns.
It also provides key metrics like impression share, overlap rate, and outranking share. This data can be used to assess competitor’s strengths and identify areas for improvement, allowing you to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Here is an illustration to show how you can leverage auction insights to take actionable steps in beating your competition:
| Key metric | Relevance | Warning signals | What can you do? |
| Impression Share | Visibility of your Ad | Low Impression Share | Increase bids, allocate more budget |
| Overlap Rate | Sharing of traffic with competitor | High overlap leads to high costs | Target less competitive but relevant keywords |
| Outranking Share | How often your ad ranks higher than competitor’s | Low share indicating competitor winning auctions | Improve ad copy, use negative keywords for better segmentation |
| Position Above Rate | How often competitor’s ad sits
above yours |
High rate indicating the competitor gaining an advantage | Improve CTR and ad relevance |
| Top of Page Rate | How often your ad sits at the top of search results | Low percentage means less visibility | Improve ad rank, use ad extensions |
Have compelling deals or offers
Creating compelling deals or offers is a powerful way to attract customers and outshine your competition. It can help to attract attention and drive sales, as most customers are price-sensitive.
Strategies such as limited-time discounts, exclusive bundles, or loyalty programs can create a competitive edge, enhance customer engagement, and ultimately lead to greater conversion rates.
Here are some ideas for irresistible deals and offers to boost your campaign:
Bidding Strategy – Utilise modern and classic to your advantage
In Google Ads, a bidding strategy is the approach you use to set how much you’re willing to pay for clicks, impressions, or conversions.
Just like how typical auctions are held, your bid competes with others whenever your ad appears in search results. The right bidding strategy helps you optimise your advertising budget to achieve your specific goals – be it increasing website traffic, getting more conversions, or maximising the visibility of your ads.
Here are three types of bidding on Google Ads:
- Manual bidding: You manually set bids for individual keywords or ad placements.
- Automated bidding: You let Google automatically set your bids to help get as many clicks as possible within your daily budget
- Smart bidding: This is a subset of automated bidding focused on conversion-based goals like generating leads or sales.
Learn more about What is the best Google Ads bidding strategy on our dedicated page.
Provide the best landing page experience
Imagine discovering a small, lesser-known restaurant tucked away on a quiet street. As you enter with a bit of uncertainty, you are greeted courteously with a warm smile. What follows next – the atmosphere is vibrant, the service is prompt, and the food is delicious!
The result? You are instantly impressed and wish to come again with your friends or family.
Similarly, a quality landing page can give even a smaller or lesser-known brand an edge. A smooth, fast, and user-friendly landing page experience makes visitors feel welcomed and assured, leading them to stay, explore, and ultimately convert.
Some key aspects of a good landing page are:
- Clear and compelling headline
- Simplistic and efficient design
- Fast loading time
- Content alignment with user search intent
- User-friendly navigation
- Strong and clear Call to Action (CTA)
- Building credibility through reviews, testimonials, and statistics
- Highlighting the product differentiator and benefits
Embrace changes – Research & Development
The examples of Kodak and Nokia show us that, despite once being industry giants, their hesitation to adapt to evolving market trends and technology ultimately led to their decline.
In a fast-paced, tech-driven world, companies must be forward-thinking and willing to innovate, or they risk becoming obsolete. Google Ads is not a platform that can run on ‘set and forget’ mode. Here’s why it is important to embrace the changes:
- Your competition is not idle, but continually refining strategies to outperform your campaign.
- Google frequently updates its algorithm, which can impact your strategies.
- Market dynamics keep evolving with changing customer preferences and trends.
- Seasonality changes can impact your sales.
- Repeated exposure to the same ads causes ad fatigue.
It is important to monitor the changing digital landscape and adapt quickly. Allocate a portion of your Google Ads budget specifically for testing new features and utilising those that deliver the best results for your business.
Utilise A/B testing
A/B testing is a powerful tool in Google Ads that allows you to systematically experiment with different variations of ads, landing pages, or strategies to determine what works best.
Here’s how you can leverage A/B testing to gain competitive advantage:
| # | Action | How can it help? |
|
1 |
Test different ad copy |
By experimenting with variations of your ad copy (headlines, descriptions, CTAs), you can identify which messages resonate best with your audience. |
|
2 |
Experiment with keywords | A/B testing can help you uncover less competitive, high-converting keywords that your competitors may be overlooking. |
|
3 |
Optimise landing pages | A/B testing landing pages allows you to refine user experience, leading to lower bounce rates and boost conversions. |
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4 |
Adjust bidding strategies | A/B testing different bidding strategies helps you discover the most cost-effective way to bid for top-performing placements. |
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5 |
Test Ad extensions | A/B testing different combinations of ad extensions (sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets), you can create more compelling ads than your competitors. |
Regularly monitor your data against the competition
Running Google Ad campaigns in isolation doesn’t work. Focusing only on tracking your website traffic, sales conversions, and customer retention isn’t enough—most of your competitors are already doing this basic hygiene.
To truly succeed, you need to keep an eye on your competitors too. By consistently comparing your data with your top competitors, you can uncover why they’re excelling—whether it’s due to faster site speed, enhanced customer experience, or more targeted marketing efforts.
With these insights, you can make strategic changes to help you stay competitive and even beat them in the long run. In a data-driven world, regularly comparing your performance is important for maintaining a competitive edge.
In 2018, Coca-Cola’s successful “Share a Coke” campaign took off. It focused on personalised, emotion-driven marketing and strong social media engagement.
Pepsi studied the market to identify gaps in its approach and responded with the “Pepsi Generations” campaign, celebrating nostalgia and pop culture – featuring iconic celebrities like Cindy Crawford and Michael Jackson.
This shift, along with enhanced social media efforts and influencer marketing, helped Pepsi narrow the market gap with Coca-Cola and reconnect with youth. The example illustrates how you can also learn from competitors to better yourself.
Get professional help to beat your competition
Keep your stress away, let us help you to stay ahead in the Google Ads game. We are a trusted Google Ads Melbourne service provider and we work with clients across Australia.
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FAQ
How do I get my Google ad to rank higher?
Improve your Ad Rank: Consider including more relevant information in your ads about your business to improve your expected clickthrough rate (CTR) and by creating ads with assets, such as site links.
Focus on relevance: Make sure your ads and landing pages are relevant to user search intent
Increase your bid: One way to outrank your competitors is by increasing your bid for specific keywords. This can increase your chances of winning the auction and showing your ad over your competitor’s.
Improve your ad quality: Another way to increase your rank is by improving the quality of your ads.
What is the outranking share formula?
Outranking share is a percentage defined as the number of times your ad ranked higher in the auction than another participant’s ad, plus the number of times your ad showed when theirs did not, divided by the total number of ad auctions you participated in.
How do I see my competitor’s impression share on Google Ads?
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon.
- Click the Campaigns drop-down in the section menu and select Campaigns, Ad groups.
- Click the columns icon.
- Click the Competitive metrics drop-down menu and select Search impr. share and Display impr. share columns by checking the boxes next to column names.
- Click Apply. Impression share data will now appear in your statistics table.
How do I know if Google Ads are performing well?
To determine if your Google Ads are performing well, primarily look at key metrics like click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (if you’re tracking conversions), cost per click (CPC), and return on investment (ROI); a high CTR and conversion rate with a reasonable CPC and positive ROI indicates strong performance, while low numbers in these areas suggest room for improvement.
