For any business that wants to get almost instant traffic to its website, the use of pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is one of the most recommended ways of doing so. There are countless platforms on which you can advertise, although Facebook, SEO, Google and Bing are where the majority of advertisers head for.
Before you head off and start paying for ads, it is crucial that you carry out research beforehand, In particular, you need to assess what your competition is doing if they are running PPC ads. From this, you can learn what keywords to use, what bids per click to make and also get some great ideas for your ad copy.
All of this is virtually impossible to do manually so pay per click software is needed. There are plenty of them available, but we are going to focus on 7 of the best.
SEMrush
If you know which keywords that you want to target, you can use SEM Rush to discover and analyse what the completion for those keywords is doing with their PPC campaign. For each competitor that SEM Rush highlights you can establish what other keywords they are targeting and how their ads are written. For those that want to do SEO alongside their paid marketing, SEM rush also provides details of those that are ranking organically for specific keywords.
SpyFu
SpyFU is an excellent PPC research tool if you want to look at the history of your competitor’s advertising going back several years. For any of your competitors, SpyFU will show each of their ads, what keywords they are bidding on, where those bids are placing them on Google, and it will show variations of each ad they are running if they are doing an A/B test, for example.
Keyword Spy
The name of this PPC research tool more or less tells you what it does. The specifics are that it will allow you to discover your competition’s PPC strategies as they relate to the keywords they use, the cost per click they are paying and how well those ads are positioned. It also highlights what your expected ROI will be on each keyword so that you can pinpoint the most valuable ones.
iSpionage
This brilliantly named PPC research tool has a low monthly cost, so it is great for those on limited budgets. Its features enable you to spy on your competitors’ best keywords, see what they are paying for clicks and their total ad budget. In effect, you are literally looking over the shoulder of your completion and seeing exactly how they are creating their PPC campaigns, including the ad copy they use.
Keyword Competitor
This is another PPC tool that has a very low monthly cost, so it is ideal for those new to PPC research who do not want to spend too much, to begin with. It provides you with daily updates on the positions of your competitions’ keywords and alerts you if they are gaining any kind of advantage over you.
Adthena
Another great name for a paid ads tool that was previously known as Adgooroo. It provides several research features and has options to analyse data within specific industries. Its analysis is detailed and covers the keywords of your competition, their ad spend, ad copy, and ad impressions to name but a few. Much of the information is provided in easy to follow charts and graphs which are colour coded to identify each competitor.
The Search Monitor
This PPC ads tool is more likely to be used by larger companies and corporations given its cost, but for that, you gain access to highly detailed and precise data from this tool’s impressive ad monitoring functions which can measure at least 1,200 different data points It will also be especially useful for those businesses that do affiliate marketing as it can provide insights into PPC ads being used by other affiliate marketers.