In today's competitive digital marketing environment, it is crucial to analyze your competitors' Google advertising strategies. By gaining a deep understanding of their advertising activities, you can gain valuable market insights to help optimize your advertising strategy and improve advertising performance. From simple SERP (search engine results page) checks to complex automated data crawling, you can collect competitor advertising data in real time through a variety of methods.

Here are five ways to conduct Google Ads competitor analysis. You can:

Manually check Google search results

Use tools provided by Google

Use third-party software

Build your own monitoring tool

Try large-scale monitoring with PIA S5 Proxy

Continue reading to master the basics of each method.

1. Analyze competitor ads through SERP

Search engine results page (SERP) is your most basic tool to analyze competitor Google ads. When you search for keywords related to your business, the ad slots on SERP will show the ads that your competitors are running. By carefully observing these ads, you can get the following information:

• Ad positioning: Analyze the keywords selected by competitors to understand their positioning strategy. Which keywords bring high rankings? Do they focus on short-tail keywords or long-tail keywords?

• Ad copy: Observe the ad copy of competitors to understand their creativity and information delivery methods. Analyze how they attract users to click and whether they use techniques such as offers and calls to action (CTA).

• Ad extensions: Analyze whether competitors use additional information (such as phone, address, website link, etc.). This can help you understand how they can provide more value in their ads.

By observing the ad display of competitors on SERP, you are able to capture preliminary data about their advertising strategy, which can provide direction for your ad optimization.

2. Use Google Ad Preview and Diagnostic Tool

Google provides a tool called Ad Preview and Diagnostic Tool, which can help you view the display of Google ads without affecting the actual search data. This tool allows you to simulate different geographical locations, devices and language settings to see the display of competitors' ads.

How to use:

• Enter your target keywords in the tool and select specific regions and device types.

• Check the ad display on SERP, you can view the competitor's ad copy, destination URL, and how the ad is displayed.

This is very helpful for gaining in-depth understanding of competitors' ad performance and their positioning strategies, especially without actually running ads, you can get effective market intelligence.

3. Use tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs for advertising research

SEMrush and Ahrefs are two very popular SEO and SEM tools with powerful competitive analysis functions. With these tools, you can deeply analyze competitors' Google advertising activities and understand their keyword strategies, ad display frequency, ad spending and other data.

How to use:

• Keyword analysis: Using SEMrush or Ahrefs, you can view the keywords that your competitors run in Google Ads, understand their advertising coverage and which keywords bring the most traffic.

• Ad history data: Such tools can track the historical data of competitors' ads, allowing you to understand the changing trends of their advertising performance.

• Ad impression and spend estimation: By estimating the ad spend and impressions of competitors, you can get a general idea of their advertising budget and delivery strategy.

These tools provide in-depth data about competitors' Google ads, which can help you adjust your own advertising strategy.

4. Automated web crawling and data analysis

In order to collect competitor Google ad data more efficiently, you can use automated web crawling technology. This method automatically extracts ad data from competitors' websites or Google SERPs and analyzes it by writing crawlers.

Advantages:

• Large-scale data collection: Automated crawling can help you collect a large amount of data in a short period of time, covering multiple competitors and ad variations.

• Real-time data update: The crawler can crawl data regularly to ensure that you get real-time updated ad information.

• Customized analysis: You can set specific crawling rules to extract the key information you need from your competitors' ads, such as ad copy, keywords, CTA, placement, etc.

Tool recommendation: Using web crawling tools like Scrapy, BeautifulSoup, etc., combined with automated data analysis platforms (such as Google Data Studio or Tableau), you can visualize and analyze the crawled data to help you more comprehensively evaluate your competitors' advertising strategies.

5. PIA S5 Proxy Ad Verification

You may have noticed that the last point of each method recommends continuous monitoring. While this is often necessary, it is tedious and time-consuming, especially if you want to build your own tools and monitor changes in real time at scale.

Use PIA S5 Proxy Ad Verification to run your ad verification quickly, smoothly, and at scale with real residential IP addresses from any country or major city in the world. Ensure that ads are displayed correctly in the right context for the right audience at the right time.

Using residential proxies helps ad verification companies access geo-restricted content and facilitate their work, because it is difficult for ad scammers to detect traffic from verified ads.

• Over 350 million pure residential IPs, covering 200+ countries

• Support SOCKS5/HTTP/HTTPS protocols

• 99.9% success rate, invalid IPs are free

• Country, state, city, ZIP and ISP level precision positioning

• Continuously expanding and updating proxy IP pool

• Support account authentication/API function

• Full terminal compatibility: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android

• User-friendly interface and operation documentation

• 24/7 support

Through the above five methods, you can comprehensively analyze your competitors' Google advertising strategies, thereby providing valuable references for your own advertising. Whether through simple SERP analysis or automated crawling with advanced tools, these methods can help you gain a deep understanding of your competitors' advertising behaviors and adjust your advertising strategies in time to improve results.

When conducting competitor advertising analysis, please pay attention to the quality and real-time nature of the data, and conduct a comprehensive evaluation in combination with industry trends. By continuously optimizing your advertising strategy, you will be able to stand out in the fierce market competition and improve advertising effectiveness and ROI.