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Please suggest me a way to do a proper competitor spy for the PPC campaign. I mainly want to know about their bidding and targeting keywords.
I’m looking for a tool or another way to spy on my competitors to find out about their PPC strategy. Does there any way you guys are doing it or a tool for that?
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1 Reply
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You can not do this with any tool. Any information tools have is often 99% wrong.
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SEMRush will pull the queries that your competitor showed on for ads. It’s not comprehensive and it’s not going to show the bid strategy or specific keywords they are targeting (though you’ll probably guess them) but you can get a rough idea.
That’s the closest you can get in most cases.
If competitor strategy is very important to you, you can run ‘canary campaigns’. These are ones that aren’t actively trying to drive the highest ROI / ROAS, but are there to inform you when competitors jump in and out of the space.
Do something like max clicks (or target imp share if low volume) and then regularly check competitive metrics and auction insights reports. Over time, you can get a sense of when competitors go in and out of the market and which keywords / campaign types they pursue.
I have a client that sells a variety of brands, and there’s a couple brands that we don’t actively target but we do have some small campaigns running just to alert us when a competitor moves in on them. Then we can decide to beef them up or give the biz away and focus on another area.
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Indirect answer but: Check out the new [Google Ads Transparency Center](https://adstransparency.google.com/?region=US)
This will only show you their ads (not keywords or bids). But it’s likely your competitors will have their keywords in their headlines.
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If you’re looking for Facebook Ads, Facebook is transparent about this and you can look up your competitor here: [https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/](https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/) to see what their ad creative looks like.
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Plug the competitors sites into Google Keyword Planner and see what keywords come up! They are likely targeting those! Then you can select some high traffic low competition ones and start with those.
The only thing you can’t do is see what bidding strategies they use, but you can honestly assume most of them run automated bidding.
Hope this helps!
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As others said any tool is an estimate, and with Google matching to broader terms it’s harder to find the exact keyword used. Semrush works, or spyfu we use, I like spyfu as it provides a cached screenshot with their ad in the list, also works great while auditing to show some irrelevant searches they showed up for.
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I’ll be honest, that sort of thing is not worth your time. Start with some core keywords (broad or phrase) and monitor your search terms.
Competitor spy tools are really better for landing page ideas and ad copy. Keywords are easy to figure out, and I don’t think any tools give bid strategy data…
Honestly, not much beats Google Ads internal keyword tool these days as the volume estimates are closest to accurate
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Try out PPCADLAB. It takes text and image snapshots of every Google ads competitor at different intervals that you set up.
100% worth the buck if you’re going down the Google Ads route
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Hi I’m Abdul Sammad and I know how to run campaigns on google ads I have a little bit of experience in google ads let me know if can work with any of you guys ????
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