At its core, advertising has competition at its heart. Advertisers want to engage with potential customers and gain their attention instead of the competition. At its core, advertising is all about stealing potential customers from competition.

PPC is a great example of this. Whether you like it or not, your adverts, for the vast majority of cases, will be surrounded and in close proximity to competitor adverts on paid search results. This makes it extremely important to the success of your PPC campaign to research your competition. Here are the main reasons why.

#1 Are You Missing Something?

The first step with researching competition is to see what you are missing that your competition is not. What have they included in their PPC search advert that you have not? What have they included in their PPC landing page that you have not? What sets them apart from you? Why do you think they have done this? From answering these questions, you can close the gap between you and competition, if one exists.

#2 What Sets You Apart?

It is important to see what your competition are promoting as USPs (unique selling points). It is also critical to use your competitor’s advertising campaign against them, to make your campaign looks better to the consumer. A great example of this occurring is Samsung to Apple. Almost on a yearly basis, Samsung analyse the advertising campaigns of Apple and their new iPhone, and produce an advertising campaign for their Galaxy flagship smartphone, using what they know of Apple. This not only makes the Galaxy flagship range look better, but also Apple’s iPhone look worse.

#3 What Ad Extensions are they using?

There are many ways you can set your advert apart from competition in PPC, with ad extensions being one of them. They are a brilliant way of adding content to your website and functionality, resulting in a higher CTR from using them. If you find that all of your competition are using ad extensions, whilst you are not, you need to ask yourself why this is the case? Is your competition gaining a lot of success from a site link extension, or a ratings extension?

#4 Use Numbers if they Favor You

Quantifying data on PPC search adverts is a risky business. They can either make your advert look financially the best option, or the worse. It’s either going to be one or the other. Of course, we want to make it look the best option, so it is very important to see what sort of numbers your competition use in their search adverts. If they don’t use numbers, then there is no quantifiable competition to worry about. If they do use numbers, then you need to make sure that if you choose to use numbers, it will work in your benefit to make your campaign look more appealing.