Competitive analysis is the first and foremost thing to do before beginning a new PPC campaign. Analyzing your competitor’s PPC ads is a great way to extract data about how their company influences conversions. It’s also a way to analyze your own ads to see what’s missing.

Let’s look at some of the tools which are available to provide competitor’s PPC campaign insights.

1. Spyfu

Spyfu provides rather specific information regarding keywords your competition is bidding on and seeing the greatest success with. Further, you can view actual ad copies they may have been running as recently as the month previous. Simply type in the web address for one of your competitors and you’ll see the estimated budget, ad position, clicks per day, keywords and ad texts. The paid version of the Spyfu interface also gives you access to about 90% more data, including keyword overlap, CPC estimates and other advanced keyword statistics, and the ability to track your own performance.   Spyfu paid plan starts with 79$ per month.

2. SEMRush

The Advertising Research tool helps you identify all keyword queries against which a competitor is running paid search ads for using Google Adwords or Bing. Use this tool to estimate how much traffic a site is receiving via paid search ads and the keywords they are targeting. SEMRush can also help you track organic keyword position changes in Google. This way you can keep track of how well your website or your competitor’s is doing in organic search for specific keywords. SEMRush Pro is available for $69.95 per month

3. Ispionage

iSpionage is a site that offers quite a bit of information for free, with even more becoming available with the paid version. By entering a keyword or domain, you’ll learn which keywords your competitors are bidding on, the ad copy they’re using and which landing pages they’re directing visitors to.

With the iSpionage PPC campaign builder, you complete the keyword research phase based on what you discover from competitors, audit that keyword research, group the terms together and then build out the actual campaigns for upload to Google or Bing.

4. Kompyte

Using Kompyte, you can compare website traffic, referrals, visitor behavior, keywords and search rankings, paid ads, and site by site social metrics of your competitor.  You can input competitors to track, or let Kompyte suggest them based on the keywords you are tracking. Kompyte’s prices start from $95/month, with a free 14-day trial.

5. Similarweb

Similarweb provides an overview of website traffic, referrals, search traffic and keywords, social media, display advertising, audience, and similar sites and apps.

6. Adbeat

Using adbeat, you can gain insights into competitor most profitable publishers, ad copy and landing pages. Adbeat’s Publisher Discovery Tool not just let you uncover where competitors and industry leaders are already spending, but also find new sources of high-quality, “undiscovered” traffic.

7. What Runs Where

WRW shows you ads from 90+ advertising platforms and 15 countries. You can research where advertisers are running their ads, which creatives they are using, how long campaigns have been running ads for and much more.

8. Social Ad Ninja

Social Ad Ninja allows you to spy on Facebook ads in 43 countries. Ads can be filtered by demographics, interests, destination URLs and many other criteria. Social Ad Ninja is $147 per month and there is no free trial available.

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Have fun spying!