System analysis of contextual advertising

Translation

Running a business is similar to taking part in a sprint race. It is important to fight off a competition within the shortest possible time. That’s why competitor analysis is a substantial part of a company's marketing plan that helps identify opponents' weaknesses and turn them into resource zones for your business growth. 

  A well-designed advertising campaign can attract prospective clients and encourage them to take targeted action. At the same time, a sufficient analysis of competitors' contextual advertising will significantly increase the chances of its effective launch. If you want to move over the competitor’s Internet-stores and attract their audience - try to discover what actions they take. 

 Why do you need to analyze a competitor’s contextual advertising?

The deep analysis will allow you to find out your competitors' budget for contextual advertising and to understand whether the chosen niche has potential. It will provide an understanding of what products are advertised and what strategies are used. Also, it’ll let you know whether the contextual advertising has been set up in several iterations, how USP is implemented in the text, what triggers are applied, what accents are put in the ad texts, and how they deviate from one another.

What to analyze? 

Before developing your advertisement campaign, it is important to understand what techniques and methods opponents use. To save time, it is necessary to decide what main points of the context to examine first:

• Keywords
• Selection of exceptions 
• Positions 
• Ads 
• Landing pages

Semantics 

Analysis of the competitive environment should start with the definition of the words that competitors target. If they use such requests for advertising, then it means that these phrases pay off and bring customers to their sites. Using the list of key requests from competitors, you can create an indicative budget for an advertisement campaign. 

How to find competitors' keywords:

Manually. Select from 5 to 7 key queries that are suitable for the activity of your web site (for example, “buy household appliances”, “order a smartphone”), enter them into Yandex or Google search engines. Analyze the results on the first page and determine the websites related to the theme of the online store. 

Utilizing special services. Use free websites as pr-cy.ru and semrush.com. All that you need to do is just enter the domain address in a certain field, and service will provide information about the most frequent search phrases.

Negative keywords 

While using the key phrases of other players on the market, you may face the problem of displaying ads to an indifferent audience, which means that search services show ads in response to requests of an untargeted audience.

Competitors' analysis with AdWords allows you to filter keywords and remove negative ones. For example, the resource does not sell Honor smartphones. Add the brand name to the negative keywords and get clean key phrases to create your own efficient ad.

Positions 

It is important to define the rating of other players in the market if you want to lead a successful advertising campaign. With the help of Google AdWords, you can evaluate the position of your opponents by correlation with your ads. Open the "Auction Statistics" tab and the system will display a report determining the position of the website and the percentage of received views. 

Using the semrush.com service, you can get information about the list of competitors. Enter the name of your website in a special field. After it, select "Paid Search" in the "Domain Analytics" menu. The service will present a table where your competitive companies will be listed.

Plus, it shows common keywords with your competitors, the value of traffic and the number of search queries. The comparison of positions will help to discover how often the publications of other market players appear in the search results concurrently with yours.

Ads 

You can also evaluate the advertising texts of your opponents using the semrush.com service. Enter the company’s domain name in the special field. Open the “ Paid Search ” tab and service will display a list of advertising publications. The number of used key phrases will be indicated for each text. Also, this service offers an opportunity to check the history of the ad of the online store.

You can evaluate competitors' contextual advertising in the search results. Enter the queries related to the theme of the web resource and see which ads and snippets are already in the search. Analyze how relevant they are. 

Snippets have recently covered 20% of all search queries. Expand them, add a phone number and location – it will help to increase the conversion level. If you do not study the publications of your opponents, you run the risk of making similar ads that will be no different from the ones designed by your competitors.

 Landing page 

Why do you need to evaluate a competitor’s landing pages? An advertisement should lead the user to a page that is relevant to their request. The more precisely you meet the expectations of a person, the higher is the chance of taking targeted action. If a person is searching “buy Samsung TV”, they should be redirected to the Samsung catalog. In the search query, the user is looking for the buying opportunity. Create a landing page for the phrase and bring the buyer directly to it. 

 By opening the first link, the user automatically gets to the necessary tab and can order the desired product. Besides, check your landing page from different browsers and operating systems to ensure it displays and works correctly to reach potential customers.

 While analyzing competitors' landing pages, pay attention to the following details: 

• Focus on the main sentence; 
• Number of banner ads that distract attention; 
• Compliance of the landing page header with the ad; 
• The landing page design and whether it calls customers to act.

Summary 

Analyzing competitors' advertising campaigns helps to avoid mistakes and saves a significant part of the funds for website promotion. Plus, the investigation of vicarious strategies often leads to the emergence of original ideas aimed to attract a new audience.