with starter PPC. Today we're going to talk about competitive analysis. Do not skip this step. You guys, every time you get a new client or if you're thinking about starting a new company, you should do this before as well as during. we typically do two checks, right? One is going to be, when we get a new client, we're going to, begin with competitive analysis. we do this to get a sense of our client's new industry, where our client is positioned within that industry, what the competitive landscape looks like. it gives us an idea of the various target markets and angles that can be chosen and, which angle our client is going after so that we can help them lean into that. it helps bring up some red flags early on, if the competition looks fierce and our clients not stepping up to the game, then, right away on day one, we're like, Hey, we are a little worried about whether this is going to work with Google ads or not. Here's what we suggest that you very quickly work on because we have 2 weeks until we go live with the ads and we give them a list. and then we might do another competitive analysis. We almost always do. About 45 days in, if it's not working. so if the ads aren't working, or we're not performing or we're not hitting goals, I would say about a month and a half in 45 days. We're going to sit down and do, a second check on the competition, and look for red flags that maybe we missed the first time now that we know more about the performance now that we have more conversion history, and try to go back and figure out what's going wrong so we can plug that hole. If it is working, then typically that second competitive analysis check doesn't really happen that early on. It would usually be, six months in when the company is growing and it hits like a roadblock in its growth. Or the performance plateaus that we're starting to, lose margin as we grow. And so we might need to go back and say, okay, how can we be more competitive? let's see what the competitive landscape looks like now, has it shifted? So I'm going to walk through a couple of examples with you guys to show you, how we do this. We don't use any tools. I think we used to use spyfu. com. there's even a free version of spyfu. SpyFu tries to take, some guesses at, what keywords your Competitors are targeting, how much their ad budget is, in the end, it's all just guesses. And honestly, we've found that we can get that same information, just more relevant to our client, just using Google's free tools. I'm going to put my face to the side here and open what I have pulled up right now is the Google ads transparency center. this is relatively new. I hope that's not an incorrect statement. I just found out about it about a year ago. I don't know if it existed before that. and I'm going to show you guys how it works. it is, I would say the main tool that we use for competitive analysis. let's say we get a new client and our new client sells tooth powder. tooth powder is toothpaste, but in the form of powder. So what we would do is we would open up a fresh tab. With Google pretending we are, a potential customer and we're searching in the same words that the potential customer would use. So maybe like best tooth powders for whitening teeth. might somebody search for when they're looking for this product? and then We look at a couple things in the search results, right? So the first thing I'm going to look at is usually the pictures because this is a product. the picture in the shopping ads is the most important thing. sometimes you might notice That some pictures are vastly better than others. so let's say this first one is our client. I would say that's a great picture. You can read what it is. you can clearly see the product. You can even see the size before having a click. That's good. You guys, we don't want. To get a bunch of clicks because every time somebody clicks, you pay for that click. So you only want people to pay if they're pretty sure they're interested. And so it's very important to show them as much of, the product in a clear way as possible. whereas this, I'm not so sure I can see what I'm getting. This is a kit and not necessarily powder, but I can't see what even comes in the kit. I don't love that picture. this one is Very far away. I don't love that. But I would assume they're going after a slightly different target market here than Our client. This isn't really our client, but I'm just pretending this is our client. so our client, is going after a wider audience. I would say, and here we've got a lower price point of only 10 for 9 ounces, whereas this one. I'd have to click on it to see how many ounces, but it looks like it's a little bit more of a high end brand. They're going after a younger audience. They've got a more stylized picture. If this was my client, I would say great picture, but I zoom in a little like, why is there so much white space? these shopping ads are very small. it's important to minimize white space and zoom in on the product as much as you can. So that's the first thing I look at. are my clients pictures, if it's a product up to par and, can I glean what market they're targeting with the pictures. here, I would just say it's like a wide A white audience, and that's good because they have basic price point. So that's fine. the next thing I'm going to look at is the text. So this is the Google ads transparency center. And the way you get to it is you click on the little three dots next to the search results. and it's going to show you more ads by this advertiser, which I just think is the coolest thing ever. now in this case, because I clicked on the three dots next to shopping ads, I can. Click between all of the shopping ads and the search results. And, maybe I want to see more by, what was it? Primal life bite. I want to see more by bite. So I'm going to go here, click on bite and then click, see more ads. This advertiser has shown. And if that advertiser has completed their advertiser verification, which is something that. if you run Google ads, you already know that Google is really cracking down on. So pretty soon everyone will have. if they've done that, then you will be able to see more ads. So wow, 86 ads that they're running. some look like they are, search ads. So we could try to find those search ads if we wanted to click on them and see what landing page they're using. I don't think you can see the landing page inside of the Google ads transparency center, unfortunately. Hi there. Quick interruption. Do you know the main thing that prevents small business owners from getting their Google ads account into a position to grow and scale budget? A lot of businesses, especially those that are just starting out, have limited budgets. And so because of this, they're turned away by most ad agencies because most ad agencies have minimum budget thresholds that they're willing to work with. So what happens is the business owners end up learning Google ads themselves. And the problem with that is that most of the advice online is geared towards larger accounts. Okay. And the advice doesn't have any of those strategies or tricks that can kickstart the algorithm into giving a small account a leg up over larger competitors. So it often just doesn't work. And the business just ends up losing money month over month. If this sounds familiar, starter PPC can help. We offer Google ads management services that are designed for accounts that have between 1000 and 5, 000 budgets. Because all of our clients are just starting out, we've come up with ways to keep our management fees significantly lower than most agencies, because we know that every dollar saved on management fees just goes towards the ad budget, which is going to help the algorithm gather speed and power. So if you're serious about growing your business and you'd like a team of Google ads experts to help you without breaking the bank, check us out at starter PPC. com. Okay. Back to the video. some display ads. This looks like a shopping ad. this is a great look and they're running some dynamic, dynamically generated headlines. DSA ads, those are called. So this is just a great starting point. If you find competitor that you want to dig in and see some of the text they're using. and gather some ideas. it doesn't have to be a shopping ad. For those of you that are lead gen, you're like, this isn't relevant to me. Why is she showing me this? what you can do is you can scroll down until you find a search ad. Now, because I searched for tooth powder, I think this is going to be a very difficult ad to find. Sometimes I have to scroll to the bottom of the page nowadays, because Google is so slow. Really leaning into this whole, shopping thing. Yeah. Let's try the bottom. I can't find a single shot, a single search ad for my best tooth patterns for whitening teeth search. any of these really, I think we'll take you to the ads transparency center. So it doesn't have to be an ad. This is an organic search result, but Oh, they're not running ads. All right. Let's try a different search. Let's pretend we have a client that sells rug cleaning services. So we're going to search for rug cleaners near me. No shopping ads this time. surprise. Now this is a competitor near me. I'm in San Diego. you might want to type near and then put the, city or town that the client's business is in if you want to see their direct competition, So then here I can see more ads that this advertiser is running. Okay. 14 ads. They've got some video ads. Very nice. I think this is a video ad attached to a maps. Maps listing is really important. I've gotten some really good insight from the ads transparency center because, for example, we had this client that was selling, like advisory services for people who wanted to invest in real estate and they wanted to open I'm blanking on what it's called right now, but people that specifically wanted to invest in real estate and, sell it and transfer the money to a new real estate, company. And in order to do that, they have to open like a Delaware statutory of trust or whatever. And, even though our clients could work with. Anyone the world, I think, and advise them on how to do this. The people who were searching were thinking that they had to work with somebody who was familiar with the laws in their city. And so I didn't know this because I'm not in that industry, but apparently a lot of the searches, are location based. And the only way I figured this out was I was doing some competitive research and I happened to notice that some of the competitors were dynamically inserting the searcher's city into the headlines. so we went to our ads and tested that out, inserting the city into the headlines, just like we saw the competitors doing and voila, our click through rate went up. You just never know what you're going to find. I'm not just examining the pictures, you guys, but I'm also examining the ad text. I'm looking for, themes along the competitors. So I can really get a good understanding of this industry and what's been working for the competition. pricing's a big one. I already touched on that. if your pricing is significantly higher than direct competitors. Why is that? Is there a reason why, are you targeting a high end audience? if not, you have a major problem, right? you have to go to your manufacturer and try to figure out why your prices are higher than your competitors can afford to sell it for. Oh, and going back to add text, most important ad text, if you are an e commerce brand is your product titles. I'm not talking about the product titles that are shown on your website. I'm talking about the product titles that are shown on your ads. And these are two different things because you can always have one product title on your site and then override that for your ads. And I highly recommend doing this because, your website might want to have a shorter titles, to keep the page shorter and pull the description up. since everybody already knows your brand. they're already on your site. You don't have to put the brand name in the product title. However, on the shopping ad, I would say about 80 percent of the time you want to add the brand name into the title. I don't know why, but it just seems to help. I really can't point to, why that is. We have to put the brand name at the end of the title. except for in some industries, like if we're doing competitive research and we can see that everybody has the brand name at the beginning of the title. That's probably because the people searching are looking for known brand tend to be looking for known branding. So you want to act like you are also a known brand name, even if you're a small business and you're just starting out. So certain industries have certain quirks like that really important to examine the competition. also examine their landing page. And the only way to really know what landing page they're using is to click on their ad, which spends their money, unfortunately, and it's rude, but it's the only way to truly see what landing page, as you can see here, they are not using the homepage of their site, even though the ad looked like they were using the homepage of their site. so they've created a landing page just for ads. Do you want to do that too? maybe not. this is conversation for another day, but this is part of what we are. What we're looking at, is we're comparing what landing page are we planning on using versus what landing page, what is the competitive landing pages look like, and is it up to par doesn't have to match perfectly, but, do we think has similar, call to actions and is it just as good. Buttons above the fold, things like that. I'm trying to think if there's anything else I want to run by you guys. there's so much to consider. I think that's everything. So I hope this has been helpful. when it comes to keyword research, I would say that's a topic for another day, but it does fall under competitive research. And what I mean by that is you want to do your keyword research around the same time that you're doing your competitive research. So you go into the Google ads keyword planner tool inside of your account, pull up keyword suggestions and try doing a few searches using those keywords because those are the keywords you're going to be targeting. And those are the keywords that Google ads algorithm thinks that your website targets. And those are then the keywords that you want to use to conduct your competitive analysis. all right. I think that's that. Thanks for watching. Good luck.