- When it comes to monitoring your competitors,
you can do something simple as searching them on Google.
Well, that's exactly what I used to do.
But then when it comes to monitoring your competitors'
marketing stack: their ads, landing pages
with laser eye precision,
you need access to some serious tools.
In this video, I will share seven tools that you can use
to improve your competitor intelligence
and use it to dominate your competition.
So the first thing which we will look at is Google Ads.
If you're running Google Ads,
there are chances that you can easily check
what other competitors you're working with or playing with.
So let me show you how that looks
if we dive deeper into Google Ads.
So I'm here in one of our accounts
and for any campaigns which we run,
we can easily verify and see
what other competitors are competing against some of the ads
and some of the keywords.
So under campaigns, when I click on Auction Insights,
I can see exactly which other brands or companies
are actually bidding for the same keywords.
For which, for example, we are bidding
and here I can see there's quite a few people or companies
currently listed and I'm using a tool like Ahrefs
so I can see exactly what other landing pages
or ads they are using.
But at least from Google Ads, I can know exactly
what companies or brands are currently competing against
for the ads, for the same ads, which we are running for.
So hopefully that will give you some kind of insight,
but obviously it can be connected to other tools
and other things, so for example, using Ahrefs.
I usually pronounce it hrefs but it could be Ahrefs.
So within the Ahrefs you can then copy one of these websites
and see exactly what landing pages and ads they're running.
Google Ads will show you the competitive landscape
when you run ads.
However, if you want to get an idea
of the competitor landscape,
you can use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs
although Ahrefs is super powerful for SEO,
keyword analysis and tracking,
it also has a great feature in which it covers PPC keywords
and landing pages.
Let's dive deeper into the tool
and let me show you how I use it for my own research.
So I'm going to log in into Ahrefs
and under the Keywords Explorer,
I'm going to type in the keyword
for which I want to understand a bit more about the industry
and what other people are doing for that particular keyword.
So if my keyword is, let's say software development
and here I can choose
which country I want to see the data from.
So I'm going to keep it United States for now.
Once I click Search, as you can see,
there's a lot of information out here
about software development.
The one area, one tab, which I'm particularly interested in
is the Ads History.
So there's quite a few things happening here.
One of the first things, as you can see,
it shows you three tabs.
And it can show you the traffic
or the number of ads for particular domain,
which is by domain and by landing page just shows you
all the different landing pages run across different URLs.
And if you click on All ads,
it will show you the actual text and the copy of the ad,
what people are using across that keyword.
So the way I particularly use it is through landing pages,
because when we're designing landing pages,
you want to understand what people are doing,
not to copy them,
but just to kind of get a feel of what is out there already
because if there's a company,
let's say I can see there's a company here called chetu.com
and as you can see, they've been running ads since 2015.
So definitely their ads work.
Otherwise they wouldn't be spending that much of money
on Google Ads.
So I would be particularly interested in seeing
what ads they're running
and what landing pages they're using.
So if I see here, when I click on the dropdown here,
they're running 95 different types of ads.
And here I can click on each of these ads
and they will open up on their landing pages.
The good thing about this
is you're not actually costing them any money.
This is all cached information from Ahrefs.
If you were typing this keyword into Google
and then clicking on the ad, which I wouldn't recommend
that would be costing your competition money,
which is kind of not fair.
So if you click on this link,
it'll take you to the actual landing page
and from here you can see exactly what these guys are doing.
So what I tend to do is I would usually
find these different domains,
which are running for quite a while,
and also by clicking on,
by checking the results by a landing page,
I will click on these landing page links
and open them in different tabs.
And while I'm doing my research,
I will see and probably save them in a bookmark
under Chrome and go through them one by one
and see what bits they're doing,
whether they're sending traffic to a dedicated landing page
versus dedicated microsite or a homepage.
Because as you know, if you send traffic to a landing page,
you have less, as you know, once you send traffic
to a landing page, there's less distractions.
So I will do that research and understand everything
about this industry,
understand more about this keyword
and finally put together an idea of things
which we should test.
So we've seen we can get information
of our competitors on Google, but what about Facebook?
The good thing is there's actually quite a lot of stuff
you can do on Facebook.
Let's have a look.
I'm looking at a very complete random examples
in case if you're Seven Districts Coffee.
I'm sorry, I just picked you,
but I'm not going to do anything malicious here.
So typically if you have a competitor and you want to see
what kind of ads they're running,
there's two ways you can get that information.
The first way is to obviously
check out the page on Facebook directly
and within a tab here, which is page transparency.
This is something Facebook recently introduced.
And if you click on See all, you would see a pop up here.
And if you scroll, it will show you ads from this page.
So it actually says this page is currently running ads,
which is cool.
This is exactly what we're looking for.
And if I click Go to Ad Library,
it takes me to a tab which basically shows all the ads
they are running and I can easily see
what ads they're running
and how long they've been running it for.
And also different types of ads as well.
So for example, this one's like carousel ads
I can see all their details.
So if I click on, see all details,
it even tells me like what kind of like assets they're using
and the description and the other copy of on the ad.
So similarly on this, on this page,
you can actually search for more advertisers.
So if you know your competitor,
either through maybe like research from Ahrefs,
or even Google, you can type in the name here
and see exactly what ads they're running.
So I just clicked on Unbounce
and I could see what ads they're running at the moment.
Again, there's a lot of information
which is useful here because you can see
what type of imagery they're using.
And if they've been using it for quite a long time,
that tells you that the ad has been successful,
otherwise they couldn't run it for that long.
I hope this is useful and you can check Ad Library
to get more insights about your competitors.
The other biggest advantage is to actually check
what landing pages your competitors are using.
So for example, within the Ad Library here,
you actually click on the call to action button
and check where the traffic is going.
So it could be a destination URL on the main website,
or it could be a landing page.
So having that knowledge is really powerful
because that helps you understand
whether you should be using a product description page,
whether you're using, for example, for an e-commerce store,
you could use a dedicated landing page.
So all of this stuff is extremely useful
and all this information is absolutely free
because it's all on Facebook
and you can easily check all this data right now.
Next up is SimilarWeb.
SimilarWeb is one of my favorite tools.
And here you can research tons of different data points
and information,
but for our case we are gonna be looking at
PPC landing pages.
So inside SimilarWeb click on the Research tab
and click on the Search Keyword Analysis.
When you're here just type in the keyword.
So for example, I'm using market automation tools
and here I can see all sorts of different metrics,
but when I click on the Paid tab on the left side,
I see there's a lot of information about the search volume,
the cost per click,
but I'm interested in the top 10 landing pages,
which appear.
So these are the brands which are currently ranking
and the best part you can click on the destination URL.
So this will actually give you the landing page,
which your competitors is using.
So if I click on this link, it will take me to the page
and I can confirm they're using an LP subdirectory,
which is short for landing pages
and here the landing page...
Yeah, this is a perfect definition of a landing page
because there are no links originating from this page
to any other page.
And yeah, so this is really, really useful and powerful.
And again, I'm currently signed up for a trial version
and you can easily do this for free initially.
But if you see value, you can sign up for the tool.
Now you know, what landing pages your competitors are using.
You're going to actually take that to the next step,
which is understanding what marketing stack
they have on the landing page.
There's a tool which I use called BuiltWith,
and it gives you so much more information
about the technologies used on that page.
So I put my own example,
which is basically a landing page,
which we host on Unbounce.
But if I type this in, I can see the different scripts,
which are currently hosted on that page
and also the technologies which are connected.
So for example, I'm using ActiveCampaign, Facebook Pixel,
Google Conversion, Google Tag Manager,
and also lots of other Unbounce related stuff,
which I obviously don't have control over,
but it does mention the content management system
is Unbounce.
And there's a lot of other JavaScript libraries information
and all that stuff, which could be useful.
So it's again, understanding and keeping up
with your competitors and maybe like,
surpassing your competitors at some point,
because all this information is useful
and will help you improve your product
and improve your landing pages.
One of the other tools which I found very powerful
and useful is Hexowatch.
Hexowatch allows you to add your competitors
so you can watch what changes they're making
to their website or to a particular landing page
or a webpage.
So it's very easy to set up an alert.
All you have to do is click on monitored URLs
and then add a URL.
And then you can define exactly what you'd want to monitor.
So for example, in this case,
if I want to monitor a competitor
and check whether they will make any changes to their website
or their web webpage in the future,
I can set up visual monitoring.
And once I add the URL and set up some of the parameters,
for example, I can set up a notification channel
that it actually sends me a Slack message rather than email.
I can also set how often should this monitoring work.
Once I add all this information,
I can click on Preview and it will actually find the mock-up
and add it here.
So as you can see here, I've got my webpage here,
which I want to monitor.
In this example, I'm using my own Agency as a reference,
but you would do this for a competitor
and click on Start Monitoring.
Once the monitor has been set up,
you will receive an email or a Slack notification
anytime your competitor makes a change
on their landing page or their website.
I hope you see how powerful this could be
to keep a really close eye on your competitors.
If you're looking for a more dedicated solution
to monitor your competitors,
I would recommend a tool called ISpionage.
This tool basically does everything
which we've covered so far,
especially in organic or even PPC.
So for example, I'm searching for unbounce.com
and I can see how much they're spending.
I can see some of the ads they're running in Google
and some of the other kind of keywords they're targeting.
At the same time I can actually check
some of their competitors who are running ads
to obviously beat Unbounce.
But I can also see their landing pages.
If I click on any of these images,
I can actually see a snapshot of the landing page.
This is really amazing
this is a goldmine of information especially if you want to understand
what exact pages these competitors are running.
If you want to try out this tool,
I have put a link in the description.
I hope you have enjoyed watching the video
and found some value from it
which you can use for your next project.
I've also linked all the tools in the description below
and before you guys leave,
make sure to subscribe to my channel
by clicking the subscribe button.
And as always have fun working on your next project,
be a conversioneer.