Whether you utilize an agency or have someone in-house, it is extremely important to understand how you stack up against the competitors in your digital space.
Hopefully, you or someone in your company has performed a deep analysis of your competition and understands who dominates your market (if you aren’t already the dominant player in the space). If not, now is a great time to start!
Typically, these competitor analyses include simple information about your competition such as their product descriptions, similarities between your product/service and theirs, weaknesses, etc.
It is important to cover this first, since having a general understanding of who is in your market will save you time in the long run when researching who is in the digital space with you.
In this post, we will be covering questions you should ask in to help identify where you stand with competitors on Google.
Who, Where, How?
Now that you’ve performed a competitive analysis and know who your competition is, it is important to know where and how they are competing with you in the digital space.
Here are a couple of things you can do to create a broader picture:
- Start simple and take a look at your current AdWords account and search keywords you are targeting on different types of search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.).
- Record who you consistently see showing up at the top of the results (if you aren’t already dominating the top position)
- Search your keywords on each search engines to get an idea of which of your competitors are utilizing specific areas of your space – and where you can branch out
- Research your competitors’ sites, and know the in’s and out’s of how it is set up. Is their structure better than yours?
- If it is, what can you do to improve yours? Knowing how theirs is set up will allow you to come up with ideas of where to made edits to your site.
Always keep in mind the most important people: your customers. Is the way your site is set up going to solve a customer’s problem more efficiently than your competitors?
Where Do I Rank Compared To My Competition?
You should already have an idea of this, based on the research you just completed by searching for your keywords on each different search engine. However, AdWords also provides us with a great tool that can help us dive a little further.
Auction Insights is a tool built into the AdWords interface that provides you with six different types of statistics to help you make strategic decisions for bidding and siplacing your budget by showing you where you are missing opportunities or ranking above your competition:
- Impression Share – the amount of impressions you received divided by the amount of impressions you were eligible to receive.
- Average Position (search campaigns only) – a way to estimate how high your ads rank compared with advertisers who are competing in the same auctions as you. This determines the order ads are shown on the search results page.
- Overlap Rate – how often a competitor’s ad receives an impression when your ad received an impression as well.
- Position Above Rate (search campaigns only) – how often another competitor’s ad was shown in a higher position than your ad, even if both ads were shown at the same time.
- Top of Page Rate (search campaigns only) – indicates how often your ad was shown at the top of the search results page (above the organic results). You can also view how often a competitors ad was shown at the top depending on which view option you have on.
- Outranking Share – a percentage regarding the amount of times your ad was ranked higher in the auction compared to your competitor’s ad, plus the amount of times your ad showed when there’s didn’t, divided by the number of auctions you participated in.
To find Auction Insights, it will be at the top of the page for both Campaigns and Ad Groups tabs; then in the Keywords tab, it will be under search terms, than the second option.
Other tools are available to help you dive into the world of dominating your competition. Here are a few suggestions: