Keep A Close Eye On Your Competition With The New “Analyze Competition Tool” From Google

By: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) posted on 06/24/2010

Marketing 101 – Understand Your Competitive Landscape

It’s one of the first things taught in any intro marketing class; one of the most important aspects of your business is where you stand in relation to your competitors.  Who competes with you for your customers’ time and money?  How do you perform in comparison to them?  These questions are essential when preparing effective marketing strategies.

These questions and others like it are just as crucial for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketers as it is for traditional media marketers.  In the past, however, there have been very few tools to assist PPC marketers with their competitive analysis.  The most they could do was manually enter in the keywords they were bidding on to see their competitor’s ad copy, or use the Traffic Estimator tool to gauge potential traffic and Cost-Per-Clicks (CPC’s) of individual keywords.

To help fill this gap and assist AdWords advertisers and business owners in understanding their competition, Google has recently released the new Analyze Competition tool.

 

Analyze Competition – What It Does

Here is Google explaining the Analyze Competition tool in their own words:

There are three key benefits of the Analyze Competition tool:

1. Understand whether your performance is in the normal range for advertisers like you.
2. Identify areas of your performance that might be improved by optimization changes.
3. Explore new opportunities to grow your account and become more competitive in your market.

Essentially, by making this data readily available, this tool will allow advertisers and businesses alike to save weeks, months, and precious advertising dollars on costly market testing.

 

Analyze Competition – How It Works

The Analyze Competition tool takes all of the guesswork out of understanding your competition.  It's simple, graphical interface allows you to get the data you want in a form that will make sense.  There are three steps to using the Analyze Competition tool:

1. Choose A Metric:
   Currently, Google allows advertisers to compare four key campaign metrics with their competitors: impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR), and average position.


2. Review The Categories:
   By crawling your web pages and AdWords campaigns, Google determines which categories (50 top-level categories made up of 7000 total categories), or themed groups, that generally describe the subject of your advertising.  This allows you to compare your performance against that of other advertisers who advertise similar products or services.


3. Review the Data:
   Google provides two types of data.  The first is the “competitive range,” represented by the bar broken into five sections, of which you belong to one in each category.  This range places you into one “bracket” of advertisers, from lowest to highest.  The bar graph allows you to see how you compare with your competitors within your competitive range.

 

Conclusion – Get A Leg Up On Your Competition

Google has added yet another intuitive and informative tool which should be included in any PPC Marketing strategy.  In conjunction with the several other tools and reporting options Google has developed, the Analyze Competition tool allows advertisers to see information and data which would have normally taken much longer to attain.  The correct analysis of this data will no doubt create new and recently unseen opportunities for advertisers and businesses to refine and optimize their PPC campaigns.