Analysis of competitors for contextual advertising. What is the analysis of competitors in contextual advertising and how to conduct it. How to simplify the analysis of contextual advertising of competitors

05.03.2020

We have released a new book, "Social Media Content Marketing: How to get into the head of subscribers and make them fall in love with your brand."

The active development of marketing entails the emergence of new abbreviations. Most often they come to us from the west and are difficult to decipher. PPC is one of them, which has already become familiar to many webmasters and Internet advertising specialists. Three words are encrypted in three letters - Pay per Click, which means "pay per click". Literally, this means that the advertiser pays the search engine or any other engine for a specific person who clicks on the ad and goes to the website.

Previously, pay-per-view was used everywhere. Or rather, for 1000 impressions. But over time, the development of tools, as well as a change in human behavioral models on the network, new approaches have appeared. Among them is PPC. It seemed, and still seems to many, the most objective. After all, the fact that a person saw an advertisement does not mean at all that he became interested or remembered it. Pay for what? And if he clicked and went to the advertiser's website, we can assume that you "met".

It is often said that PPC is contextual advertising. It is not correct. Contextual advertising can work according to the PPC model or any other, for example, CPA (pay per action) or CPM (T) (pay per 1000 impressions).

Where is PPC used?

AT PPC advertising is a pay per click model. Since clicks are only in online advertising, this model is mainly used in online marketing. Advertisements can be placed anywhere: on search engines, social or teaser networks, websites and partner networks that offer such pricing. Most often used to drive traffic to a website.

What for? To turn an interested visitor into a buyer. The person who clicked on the ad is much closer to the moment of making a purchase than the one who simply saw it without taking any action.

It is very easy to imagine what online advertising is, because it surrounds us as soon as we go online. Moving through the pages of sites, spending time on social networks, watching videos, we are surrounded by advertising. All of it is placed by advertisers through special systems, and is paid according to the chosen model. If the PPC payment model is chosen, then the ad can be shown many times, but the advertiser is only charged when the user clicks on it and goes to the site.

CPC vs PPC - What's the difference?

As you already know, PPC is a pricing model, and CPC is directly the price that an advertiser pays for each specific click. It can be fixed or flexible. Flexible pricing is typical for social networks and search engines. The final cost of a click in them always depends on the competition in a certain period of time, exactly when the user clicks. It is also affected by the Quality Score of the advertisement and the site to which it leads the user. Each of the systems has its own criteria for assessing quality, so they must be approached individually.

But the pay-per-click model cannot be considered effective based on CPC alone. Of course, the lower the cost per click, the better, but the benchmark is always ROI. This is another abbreviation, without understanding and taking into account which you should not try to analyze the effectiveness of Internet marketing. It stands for - return on investment, which in Russian means - return on investment. We will not go into the details of analyzing this metric, but you should understand that the goal of any PPC campaign is to get CPC as low as possible, get targeted traffic, high conversions and high ROI.

What does a PPC specialist do?

PPC specialist - manages advertising campaigns. In fact, there is no person with such a narrow specialty. Often this is a specialist contextual advertising, whose responsibilities include managing advertising campaigns on different sites using different models pricing in order to get best result. For this he:

understands various advertising tools;
closely communicates with the sales department and together with them determines the priority categories of goods for sale on the Internet;
creates advertising campaigns, adjusts them depending on the features of the system.
monitors campaigns, analyzes and constantly works to improve their performance.

A PPC specialist can be full-time if the company is large and involves the sale of a large number of goods or freelance.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, fight at least a hundred times, there will be no danger; if you know yourself, but you don’t know him, you will win once, you will fail another time; if you don’t know yourself or him, every time you fight, you will be defeated.”

Sun Tzu, treatise "The Art of War", VI-V centuries BC. e.

“I really enjoyed the webinar, I couldn’t have described how to properly use our service and interpret the data myself.”

Anton Mikhailov, CEO of SpyWords about the webinar "System Analysis of Competitors"

Analysis of competitors is like a photo of naked celebrities: when you write about it, you can 100% count on the attention of the audience. The passion for peeping through the keyhole is as old as humanity, and nothing can be done about it. But just looking is not enough. Even if you know how to do it well, that's not the point.

For an entrepreneur and digital marketer, real strength lies in looking at competitors and being able to “take out” systemic, strategic advantages and seamlessly integrate them into your business, avoiding copying shortcomings.

The latter is especially interesting. I've seen ad campaigns built for underperforming keywords hundreds of times, UX solutions that reduce conversions, manager scripts that push customers away - "we did it because our competitors have it." Do not do it this way.

This material is not so much and not only about “spying” on competitors. It is about how to separate the wheat from the chaff in the analysis of sworn friends, and, having separated, understand how and why to integrate a solution taken in someone else's process into your business.

System analysis of semantics

“If you don’t know what you want, you will die in a pile of what you didn’t want.”

"Fight club"

The main thing is to set the right goal. When the end is known, the means can almost always be found.

So what is the purpose of semantic analysis? The most common answer to this question is: we want to find cheap and effective queries for which competitors are advertising. However, such a goal is unrealistic and meaningless. To understand why this is so, one needs to have a good understanding of how the collection of the semantic core itself works.

So, you have a business, you sell goods or services. To launch an advertising campaign that attracts customers, at the first stage you need not requests, but bases. A query is a set of words or symbols that is a condition for displaying an advertisement, a targeting condition. Basis is a condition for collecting a large number of nested queries. Here is the simplest example:

The point is that if you sell plastic windows, then for a guaranteed at the level of logic 100% coverage of all possible phrases and lead cost minimization by working with low-frequency key phrases (LF), you need to:

Take the basis of "plastic windows".
Collect all requests that include "plastic windows + something else" and have a non-zero frequency in the business region. To do this, we are working on Wordstat 2-3 levels deep, hints and reports on search queries in Yandex.Metrica.
Review all these phrases in a semi-manual mode, select irrelevant ones and form a file with negative keywords from them.
Take all the remaining phrases (the so-called clean ones) and cluster them - break similar phrases into groups, taking into account user intents.
Create advertising campaigns from them and then work with analytics and optimization.

However, in practice, everything is somewhat more complicated. In an ideal world, as a small business, we can indeed take all the phrases that include "plastic windows + something else", according to the second point.

However, such phrases will several hundred thousand. The exact number depends on the region, the number of search queries from Yandex.Metrica and the season, since Wordstat will return a different number of phrases at the top and bottom of the season, especially at levels 2 and 3. Collecting phrases in itself is not a problem - it's fast and inexpensive. Difficulties arise with the cleaning and clustering of the array, in which there will be 80-90% irrelevant phrases.

Thus, there is a contradiction: in order to get the maximum coverage and the maximum number of low-cost LFs, we need to collect on a “general”, coverage basis (mask) “plastic windows”. However, in practice, it is not possible for a medium or small business to process such an array in a reasonable time.

Therefore, one has to resort to the “art of the possible” and select refined bases that:

give more motivated commercial subqueries;

will give a smaller amount of nested phrases;

by increasing the number of bases as such, they will meet the needs of the business in lead generation.

So, instead of one “plastic windows” basis with a huge and very “dirty” low-frequency tail, you need to take bases of this kind:

Conclusion: collecting semantics is the process of finding bases that would meet several conditions:

basis relevance and most of the nested queries for business purposes;
low garbage content nested low-frequency tail (garbage content from 20 to 50% can be considered normal);
sufficient basis coverage: if you take requests of 5-6 words as a basis, you will not be able to collect almost any tail and, as a result, the necessary traffic;
the number of bases and their inherent potential traffic must meet business needs in applications.

Now, understanding what the collection of semantics is, we can set the right goal related to the analysis of the semantics of competitors: we are trying to find not individual queries, but new bases, their synonyms and reformulations that we did not take into account, but they came to the minds of competitors.

When we have a goal, we can move on to choosing tools to achieve it and, along the way, consider why competitor analysis services like SpyWords cannot be used to analyze individual search phrases, as most users do.

There are not many tools available:

SpyWords— analysis of semantics, ads, queries in organic search results in Ru;
Serpstat- similarly, however, there are bases not only for the Ru zone, but also for Western countries;
Advse- similarly;
MegaIndex- similarly, there are a number of other functions;
SimilarWeb- traffic estimation, breakdown by channels, quite accurate for large sites and approximate for small ones.

The rest of the services, in fact, do not deserve attention, as they provide low quality data. To choose the right tool for our task, let's study how each of these services works.

Group of services "Issuance Parsers"

I combined SpyWords, Serpstat, Megaindex into one group. The fundamental similarity of these services is in working with a fixed database obtained by parsing (scanning) search results.

How it works?

The service takes a certain database of requests.
Cleans up junk and discards the least frequent ones, such as those with a frequency of 1 to 5, to reduce scanning costs.
Scans search results for all queries from the database, saves locally.
When a user searches for phrases for which a particular site is ranked, the service gives him these phrases.

What are the disadvantages of such a method?

It is not known where the database comes from, which requests were included in it and which were not, its completeness and coverage in specific topics is unclear.
You can not be sure of the quality of the database update and efficiency.
Scan results differ from the results users see due to the personalization of the search results.
In reality, scanning is difficult to do more than once a month for a large database of queries. This means that the data will be approximate.
There are 90 regions in Russia. Even if you have a database of 100 million phrases, to get results for each region, you need to make 9 billion search queries per month. As the owner of the related MOAB Tools service, I can say that this task will definitely cause sharp and aggressive opposition from Yandex, at least.

It is these shortcomings that exclude the possibility of using these services to analyze specific requests. The high “approximation” of these data dictates the appropriate methods of their application, which we will discuss below.

At the same time, I consider SERP scraping to collect information about competitors and their semantics best method possible. Advse, which follows a different path, gives data much worse than the services of this group.

For our purposes, the size of the service base and the frequency of its update are important.

Let's see:

Thus, according to formal indicators, SpyWords is still in the lead, below we will test all services in practice.

Group of services "Other data sources"

Service Advse receives anonymized data from the browser toolbar. The method is good, but there is no toolbar in the official Chrome store, and when it is installed, the browser issues a notification about maliciousness, which obviously does not contribute to the growth in the number of installations.

However, the formally declared 17 million requests are clearly not capable of making the service a leader in our rating.

SimilarWeb- a service of a slightly different category. It is stated that he uses browser toolbars, his own and others, buys access to statistics, and also works with "other sources". As the owner of an agency, I have access to the Metrica of a large number of large commercial sites, therefore, after comparing the data from the free version of SimilarWeb with the real ones, I can say:

for sites with daily traffic from 2-3 thousand unique users per day, SimilarWeb is quite accurate, the error is 10-30%;
for sites with daily traffic from 500 to 1500 uniques per day, the SimilarWeb error is around 20-40%;
for sites with less than 500 uniques per day, SimilarWeb gives very inaccurate data.

There is information about keywords in the service, but publicly announced statistics are not available. The current cost of the Pro version has not been announced on the service website either, but the forecast is disappointing:

Summary: from a formal point of view, SpyWords remains the leader of our rating.

Now, keeping the goal in mind and knowing how the visibility analysis services work, we can develop an algorithm for analyzing the semantics of competitors and compare our test subjects in “combat” conditions.

Analysis of semantics and search for new bases

1. We make a list of competing sites, if there is none: we remember ourselves and use special tools in services. To collect the list automatically, you need to enter your site in the system, and it will show us the sites whose core overlaps with ours as much as possible. For clarity, let's take the site of our client incubonline.ru - a store for poultry products. Finding competitors:

Then we sort them by the number of overlapping requests:

After that, we check how the proposed domain is our competitor. If this is true, we export and save all the phrases available for it.

In Serpstat, this tool is available here:

2. We transfer all the data to the Key Collector using the good old CTRL+C and CTRL+V. As a result, you should have a project like this:

It didn't even make sense to export statistics from Advse:

3. And finally, the final stage is the analysis of the obtained samples and the search for new bases.

From a practical point of view, SpyWords also remains the leader: the largest database, the largest size of returned samples. The best possible, let's say, with all the shortcomings of the data collection method through the issuance parsing.

Semantics: instead of a conclusion

Within the framework of this article, I cannot talk about semantics endlessly: otherwise, who will read it? Therefore, it may seem that I needlessly complicate a simple process: if you sell incubators, then take the bases “chicken incubators” and “quail incubators”, and here you are.

In fact, everything is much more complicated, in real life bases consist of hundreds of synonyms, formulations, related queries, and so on. Here are some real semantic plans that we at the agency draw up on a daily basis:

Subject "Metal rolling" - almost 500 bases, 191,000 phrases.

"Construction of houses in the Crimea" - 120 bases, 12,000 phrases.

"Tires" - more than 1000 bases, 54,000 phrases with non-zero frequency.

"Repair of household appliances" - more than 1000 bases, about 60,000 phrases with non-zero frequency.

"Transformers" - more than 250 bases, about 27,000 phrases with non-zero frequency.

The data structure is the same everywhere: in the first column, the basis, then the frequency, the size of the semantic tail, at the bottom - traffic and budget volumes, data on the potential cost of applications. Especially in the cases of Rolled Metal and Tires, it is clear how many initial bases are needed to fully cover the entire demand, namely, manual selection of bases with a relatively “clean” and target tail is the most labor-intensive task. Those who want to collect tails on these bases can always use the free MOAB Tools tariff and make sure that my words are right: it is easy to collect semantics, it is difficult to collect bases.

System analysis of ads

“If you are not noticed, you are left with nothing. You need to be noticed, but without shouting and deception.

Consistency and understanding ultimate goal analysis is the key message of this article. Therefore, we will deal with this from the very beginning.

Search ads on the example of Yandex.Direct

If we bring the ranking of ads on search (in fact, in Google, in Yandex) to a rough model, then it will be as follows: minimizing impressions, maximizing clicks.

That is, we must reduce the number of impressions to non-targeted user groups (due to negative keywords, temporary and geotargeting, maximizing the likelihood of a click for those who still see the ad). This simple idea follows from the main axiom of the search context: the higher the CTR, the lower the cost per click. The more efficiently you spend the advertising space of a search engine, the more profitable it is to work with you.

In Yandex.Direct search ads, we have 10 fields, listed in descending order of impression probability:

title,
second header,
text,
display link,
Quick links,
clarifications,
extensions,
address, metro, phone.

All these fields serve two purposes:

Provide text relevance of the ad by including the query in the title and stop the user's gaze (eye-stopper).
Convince a person to click exactly on our ad using the USP added to the text and other fields.

With proper work with clustering, you will have to deal with a large number of keyword groups, each of which will have a separate ad or a group of them. The markers of these groups (basises) usually contain from 3 to 5 words and do not always fit into the first heading, it is often necessary to use the second heading to ensure that the heading is relevant to the basis.

Thus, for the USP we have not so many “free” fields left:

second heading (not always);
description, since practice shows that the mention keyword in the description does not bring objective advantages;
Quick links;
clarifications and other additions where they are shown.

It is clear that there may be some non-standard solutions, but most often everything unusual comes down to eye-stopping solutions, for example, when emoji are inserted into a Google Ads ad. Business USPs are often pretty standard, at least in retail and services.

What analysis algorithm can be recommended?

Take the semantic plan with bases that you have after analyzing the semantics.
Take a look at the advertising results for basic queries, write out the business USPs from the ads in a separate file.
Now put together the combination of USPs that will give you the most impact. It is done like this:

each topic has must have USP that form the consumer pattern. They are used by all more or less large players, so you should definitely have them too. For example, in industrial b2b topics, this is a free calculation, assembly or installation at the facility, and so on. If you have the file from point 2 at hand, you can easily determine what entrepreneurs in this industry have "accustomed" the consumer to. By entering 2-3 key USPs into the “free” fields, you will prove to the consumer that you provide the basic level of service accepted in the niche

the next task is to prove that in addition to the generally accepted USPs, you also have a zest. And here you need competitor analysis in the first place in order to generate unique USP if you don't already have it, of course. I would definitely place this message in the description, and the “basic” USP, for example, in sitelinks. Of course, the fields and format are subject to change.

Another important task that a specialist solves when analyzing competitor ads is choosing a strategy for working with landing pages. Topics with a well-established consumer pattern have their own “traditions” that are better not to be violated without a strong motivated need.

For example, microloans are most often sold from landing pages with integrated “on demand” text substitution, and in the subject garden tool— 99% of search results, including advertising, for multi-page online stores.

And here, manual “basic” analysis can solve several problems:

You will be able to understand what type of landing pages it is customary to sell from in a niche.
If the topic is from e-commerce and is filled with multi-page sites, then in the process of analysis you will be able to identify segments where clustering is poorly developed for people. For example:

An example of "unsaturated" issuance. Even if we don’t leave aside landing pages, only one answer shows normal textual relevance – our client divers.ru.

Identifying such "unsaturated" topics with relevant answers is a difficult, long, costly undertaking that provides many opportunities in the future, especially in terms of margin. Although sometimes there is not much traffic in such segments, but if all players offer goods at a market price and pour traffic stupidly on the main page of the site, you can make a relevant landing page and drive 20% more expensive products, right?

Announcements in YAN and KMS

Systematic analysis of ads in networks is somewhat difficult, since you will never be able to see the full picture: there is no source that can show you all or most of the ads of competitors in YAN and GMS, you will always see only a small part of the whole, those creatives that the system decided to show it to you most often.

And here I would like to digress a little from the analysis itself and focus on a mistake that we encounter almost daily and that we often analyze in the course - the desire to make announcements as visible as possible.

For example, an advertiser made a campaign for search, where he was chasing a high click-through rate. When it's time to work with YAN, the advertiser places on the creative beautiful girl with an inviting facial expression, pictures with communications of free this or that. He tries to maximize the eye-stopping factor so that the ad gets noticed and clicked on. Do not do it this way.

In networks, CTR does not affect CPC. By default, your ad is shown to a much larger target audience than on search, this is a more “dirty” audience with less motivation in most cases. The more catchy ad, defiant, bright, the more attention it will receive from everyone users who see it. And you do not need attention "from everyone."

You only need the attention of those who are psychologically more or less ready to buy, who are considering buying your product or service, at least in the medium term. That is, you should not chase CTR, but strive to “cut off” those who are not ready to buy from the click, who are just looking, who are simply bored and have nothing to do. Your task is to make it clear that there is a product or service for money, this offer goods for a certain price.

System analysis of websites and competitors' managers

“All people know the form by which I won, but they do not know the form by which I organized the victory. The form of the army is like water; shape near the water - avoid heights and aim down; the form of the army is to avoid fullness and strike at the void.

Sun Tzu, treatise "The Art of War", VI-V centuries BC. uh

Analysis of the conversion "traffic - application" and "application - sale" from competitors is one of the most difficult stages in digital. A successful website is visible to everyone, and everyone can look at it, analyze it, and copy it. Still at 10 successful projects there are 90 sites closed in obscurity and with no hope of even minimal profitability.

There is no ready-made solution for sales analysis, but something can be done. Let's try to systematize and algorithmize at least the main stages of this process. I suggest you take the file that I use myself. It has two tabs for analyzing sites and managers:

In column B— parameters by which we carry out the analysis, in columns D-H- conditional sites of competitors, there can be any number of them. In the rightmost column in each of the tabs, the criticality of the parameter is marked according to my subjective assessment.

Let's break down the least obvious of the options, starting with the Competitor Site Analysis tab:

Line 3, "Substitute numbers"— substitution of numbers for each region or city, detailed description- on Cossa, it can be implemented using special services. This has nothing to do with call tracking.

Line 4, "Personalization by city in content"- modification of content (prices, text, pictures, videos, reviews, reviewers) depending on the user's IP. For example, we used such a feature for some user groups on pages like this one: if the service has customer reviews from your city, then they are displayed first of all.

Line 6, "Chat"- pay attention to the chat provider. Chats from Jivosite are now displayed in the organic search results of Yandex, which increases the visibility of the snippet in the organic. If you have a lot of organic traffic, this is important; if not, you can use another service. In Jivosite, personalized greetings with a substituted city and request are configured only through the API, and in Envybox - through a native constructor without the participation of a programmer.

Lines 9-11, Capture Forms, Callbacks- many sites use their callback and capture forms. With the exception of banks and the like, where marketers are bound by data privacy, the use of self-written solutions is evil. It's not even that they work worse, but that popular solutions - like the same Envybox - have a huge cookie base.

Example: A user filled out a form on your competitor's site or any other site that also hosts Envybox. The link "cookie - phone" is fixed in the Envybox database, when a person comes to your site and is going to order a call back, his number will automatically be substituted into the form, filling out the form will be reduced from 11-12 clicks to two.

Therefore, it is beneficial to put on your site:

specialized capture and callback services, if they support storing cookie-phone associations;
services used by the majority of players in your field.

Line 13, "Discount for Like or Share"- technically, you can set up a script that gives the user a discount coupon in a pdf file after he has liked the page on VKontakte. In the case of contextual advertising, this script can be enabled via UTM for vital traffic if you do not want to scatter discounts. Or turn it on for all traffic if you are into white hat behavioral factors.

Line 73, "Online payment"- I would not like to call for a "dirty" game, but I'm sure a significant part of your competitors do not send online receipts after payment, right?

Line 75, "Mobile phone in contacts"- if mobile phone often found on competitors' websites, this indicates a low level of competition and professionalism, as well as the fact that the decision maker himself answers the calls, a significant part of the calls are probably merge, since there is no ATS and distribution by managers.

Line 76, "Product order in categories"— we had a case where a custom (manual) order for displaying products in the main categories increased the conversion by ~ 50%. That is, initially there was a sorting of goods “by price in ascending order”, but in reality, other goods that people were used to were the most in demand, even if they were more expensive. This problem may seem far-fetched for landing pages, but in a store with 500 or more products, 50-100 or more categories, manually working out the output order often gives great results.

Line 77, "Contacts via messengers"- Another popular way of communication, typical for some topics. For example, we work with the topic “Excursions in Thailand”, where this type of contact is 80-90% of leads. Speaking globally, don't try to argue with what people are used to.

Line 83, "shop in the Market"- rather as an indicator of niche competitiveness. Strict moderation of Yandex.Market imposes certain requirements on the business infrastructure, leaving in the game those whose readiness for sales is clearly above the minimum level.

Tab "Analysis of competitors' managers"

It is important to understand that competitors in this case are analyzed not only to identify what they have badly, but also to find out what they have good in order to be at least as good. According to this checklist, it would be good to run your own website and sales department. Those moments that are “worse than those of colleagues” first of all need to be corrected and finalized.

line 10, “The same person or a different person works in the chat and on the phone”- different managers should work in the chat and on the phone, as this is a completely different profile of activity. As a rule, on the phone it is important to work with the client's problem and lead him to a check, in the chat it is important to work with the client's problem and lead him to voice contact. The opposite situation may indicate either a small number of applications for the project in principle (it is unprofitable to hire separate managers), or poor organization of lead processing. Organize better - you can use this flaw.

Separately, I note that the organization of such a checklist in the form of a table with an analysis of a large number of leading competitors with the highest traffic allows you to see the system flaws of colleagues - those points where all or almost all projects are wrong. These points are a ready-made micro USP, for example, everyone answers in the chat in 30-40 seconds, we will answer in 5-7.

I would like to draw special attention to lines 17-22. These parameters show how much a manager is able to see a certain global problem, which needs to be solved.

Conditional example from own business

A client calls who sells the implementation of specialized software for truck fleets (for fuel metering, GPS tracking and a number of related functions). The client asks: do SEO for me. It would seem that there is a request - there is a commercial offer. If they ask SEO - sell SEO, what are the problems? Moreover, the topic is non-competitive, normal positions for all key queries can be achieved relatively easily.

But the question is what exactly SEO should be done for this client in general in the tenth place: the specifics of the niche are such that there is not so much “direct” demand, i.e. users who are interested in implementing the product right now, and capital investments in finalization site, content, link promotion - relatively large, given the timing and potential output. Profitability will be, of course, but in 3-5 months, and lead generation will quickly hit the ceiling.

The strength of the manager here is to show the client that he has an offer that does not need a "direct" demand. His product allows fleets to earn more right here and now, so we need not only and not so much those few who are looking for implementation “right now”, we need fleet decision makers. They need to show ads in YAN with the message “learn how to save XXX rubles per month in your fleet.”

The selection of queries that allow you to target such decision makers, segments in Yandex.Audiences, mail databases, and other things is the next step. First, it is important to see behind the problem that the client sees, the problem that needs to be solved for his happiness in fact.

This example can be extrapolated to any business, I use examples from the agency industry only because I know it well. But in almost every business, you can "bill", or you can sell an intelligent add-on for a product or service, a "solution to the problem" of the client.

I think the rest of the main items on the list will not cause you any questions. However, if something still remains unclear, ask in the comments, I will be happy to help you.

Conclusion

Remember that someone else's successful solutions are, first of all, someone else's successful solutions that work in someone else's business process. Do not mindlessly copy, create your own product, in which the basic level of service for a niche will be combined with a unique offer. This will be the best foundation for LTV: you are remembered not for an intrusive callback form, but for offering unique features that others do not have. As an example I can give own business(contextual advertising agency): we always work on client accounts, we collect semantics for free before the contract, we make accurate (± 10-20% in most cases) forecasts of traffic and applications on the presale.

If we were to copy our competitors and their USPs, we would never offer our customers exactly those features. But now people buy from us thanks to them.

Be yourself and believe in your product. Everything will work out.

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. Website promotion consists of analytics and active actions (buying links, internal optimization, content creation, etc.). The second without the first is money down the drain. There are a lot of services that provide data for SEO analytics, but it’s easy to get confused in them, and the quality of services and functionality is different for everyone.

At the same time, a meticulous, seasoned SEO specialist who needs both a set of tools for promotion and deep Scan its effectiveness immediately, it is rarely possible to find something worthwhile. In my opinion, SE Ranking is just the service that deserves the attention of the pros. I have not yet seen more detailed statistics on positions and more diverse functionality.

"Positions" module, or checking positions on request

SE Ranking offers to create a project in the "Projects" section. Here you need to specify the name, site address, the depth of collection of positions, the frequency of reports, and so on. Next, in the “Positions” section, you need to select the created project and add requests for analysis and tracking.

Conveniently, within the framework of one project, you can different countries and cities. Until recently, it was possible to check them in the search engines Google, Yandex, Yandex Mobile, Yahoo, Bing. Now we have connected more positions in Youtube, Google Maps and Google Mobile. In the near future, as the support said, Amazon will also be connected.

landing page. During the project creation process, the optimizer provides a list of queries that need to be tracked. SE Ranking does not recommend setting specific URLs for them. It automatically determines which pages rank for which queries. If the landing page in the SERP changes, the system notifies you.

*Clicking on an image will open it full size in a new window

If you need to set a specific URL, you can do it at any time by changing the project settings.

Or just click on the desired query to designate the landing page.

Within a project, requests are easily grouped into separate folders. For example, you can set groups by frequency - HF, MF and LF, by subject and any other criteria.

Statistics are presented in the form of tables with customizable columns and in the form of graphs that clearly show the average position of the request, traffic forecast, site visibility and the percentage of requests in the TOP-10. You can filter statistics by time intervals. You can also add up to five competing projects here to analyze their positions in real time for the same keywords, search engines, and regions that your site is being tracked for.

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Other useful options within the tool:

Ability to compare data on two dates;
Viewing the dynamics of the average position;
Traffic forecast by requests;
Visibility of requests in search engines;
Comparison of query positions in search engines.

SEO/PPC Competitor Analysis

Competitor Analysis SEO/PPC is a tool that allows you to monitor the position of competitors in organic search and contextual advertising.

Detailed statistics are available on the requests of competitors in the organic with the dynamics of their growth / fall in the search results. Simply enter a competitor's address or keyword to collect data on existing competitors.

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In the paid search results analysis section, you can view which ads are placed by competitors in contextual advertising, how many of them for each key request, and in what positions they are. The system also has an archive of previous contextual advertising campaigns.

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This toolkit can be used not only to search and analyze competitors, but also to select semantics. In the "Keyword Analysis - Related Keywords" section, you can view data on similar queries, including frequency, number of sites in SERP, competition, and more. SE Ranking has the largest database of keywords in the CIS. For those who are moving “to the west”, there are large bases for analyzing competitors in France, Italy, Canada, Spain, the USA, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Denmark.

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The service will create a comprehensive error report, conduct a detailed SEO audit of the page with accurate data. To do this, you need to specify the URL of the page and the keyword under which it is sharpened.

A list of recommendations is attached to the analyzed page, which is based on the current requirements of search engines. SE Ranking specialists monitor changes in PS algorithms and constantly add new or remove irrelevant items from the audit.

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The report can be exported to PDF, sent by e-mail, or provided to the client as their own audit.

The report contains information about the page's SEO metrics, referring backlinks and outbound links, page load speed, and other technical nuances.

Displays information about the popularity of the page and the site as a whole in social networks.

Comprehensive and versatile from SE Ranking will tell you what and how to change on it to improve its ranking. In the service, you can also analyze the site completely. This knowledge can be used for its further development.

Keyword clustering

The system is fully automated. It distributes keywords into clusters based on the analysis of the TOP 10 search engines. Using this tool, you can quickly distribute keywords throughout the site, avoid cannibalization, determine which queries are best placed on the main page and which ones on internal pages.

There are a lot of settings for meticulous SEO-optimizers, for example, clustering accuracy, region, language, list of sites from the TOP-10 on request, frequency check (exact, phrase and frequency match), the list of highlighted words on the SERP pages for a given list of keywords.

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web monitor

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To start monitoring, you need to add a list of pages for which monitoring is required. The system monitors changes in content, meta tags, incoming and outgoing links, indexing in Yandex and Google, and other parameters.

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With the help of flexible settings, you can set periodic scanning (once a day/week/month, on certain days) or run it at any time.

Backlink analysis

With this tool, you can find out:

What backlinks do you or your competitor have;
Types of links and the volume of its link mass;
Information about the semantics of promotion (for which queries the rival site is promoted, what anchors it uses);

It is possible to check the parameters of backlinks and the pages on which they are located. You can find out the following information:

TCI page and site as a whole;
anchor list of backlinks;
indexing status in Google and Yandex;
link status (found or not, server response code, closed in nofollow/noindex, in robots.txt);
rating of the donor site by Moz, Alexa.

Backlink Monitoring

You can track on the graph how the number of links changes, view the cloud of anchors and evaluate which donors use which anchors. You will see how the link mass grows, what is the age of the backlinks.

SEO potential

Using this module, you can estimate the cost of attracting traffic from Google Adwords, the amount of potential traffic from organic issuance, the predicted amount. To find out the number of leads, you need to set the conversion from visitors to customers, the cost of each target action.

The module allows you to evaluate:

potential traffic to the site;
its cost if contextual advertising in Google Adwords were used for promotion;
potential number of leads.

The tool will help you determine:

what is the maximum number of people that can be brought from organic search results;
where it is more profitable to invest in SEO or contextual advertising from Google Adwords.

The tool is located in the "Analytics and traffic" section. Select a project, go there and select the "SEO Potential" tab.

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conclusions

SE Ranking is a powerful toolkit wrapped in an intuitive interface. With it, you can easily analyze the site by a huge number of parameters and generate a professional report for the client on promotion, you can adequately and accurately monitor the effectiveness of SEO strategies, correct site errors, and so on.

SE Ranking is easy to learn and suitable even for a novice optimizer. Although the pros will not remain indifferent to it, as the service saves time. In addition, tangible updates are released every 1-2 months: databases by country for competitor analysis, new tools (such as a lead generator), filters for external links. So it becomes even easier to manage projects of any complexity.

Good luck to you! See you soon on the blog pages site

What does a competent analysis of contextual advertising consist of?

Let’s take a look at the components of competitor analysis:

competitor keyword analysis;
targeting;
titles and texts of ads;
completeness of ads;
landing pages;
competitor's budget
analysis of contextual display advertising;
comparing the effectiveness of participation in the auction relative to competitors.

Analysis Tools

We use the following tools to analyze competitors' contextual advertising:

English sites: Semrush, Spyfu.
Russian-language sites: Serpstat.com/ru (formerly Prodvigator.ua).
Contextual advertising services themselves.

Especially for our blog, colleagues from Serpstat prepared a description of the main functionality for analyzing competitors' contextual advertising.

What to look for when analyzing competitors' contextual advertising?

1. Keywords of competitors

The basis of paid search traffic is the keywords that trigger ads. Instead of wasting time manually collecting key phrases, select keywords from your competitors and use them in your campaign.

Let's show with an example: enter the competitor's domain into the Serpstat service search, select the region and go to the "Site Analysis - Domain Analysis - PPC Analysis - Keywords" tab.

Also pay attention to the number of ads in different regions of search engines. In our case, the site buys only 173 ads in Google RU, and in Yandex. Moscow time - 26 800! Explore all regions for a complete semantics download.

If you have a pre-made list of negative keywords that are not relevant to the content of the site, add it to the appropriate filter before downloading the report.

Another way to find keywords that competitors use, but we miss is by crossing requests between three different domains.

Let's show with an example: in the same module "PPC analysis", we go down to the "Comparison of domains" tool. We enter two competitor domains that give advertising into the windows, and look at the results.

Intersecting segments in the diagram are common key phrases, non-intersecting segments are unique keys related to the same domain. Click on the desired segment and get the semantics we missed, which can already be used in your own advertising campaign.

2. Titles and texts of announcements

All the way your competitors present themselves can be used for your own purposes. Headlines and ad texts are a very important part of such positioning and a method of influencing users. Explore these elements in detail: see what your customers offer, what their unique selling proposition is, if there are promotions and bonuses, what are the prices. Borrow interesting ideas and offer the best terms. How to find competitor ads? Manually or using all the same services.

Let's show with an example: if you want to find out the texts of ads for a particular product or keyword, enter the keyword in the Serpstat search box and go to the "Keyword Analysis - PPC Analysis - Ads" section. The service will show you ads that include the search phrase in the text or synonymous words:

Do you want to study all the ads of each individual competitor? Do the same, only in the search bar enter not the key query, but the competitor's domain. Then you will see all his ads.

Upload all the results into a single table, analyze them and create your own unique offer! Create a table like the following:

3. Completeness of ads

Pay attention to the completeness of your competitors' ads: the virtual business card is filled, whether extensions are used, whether dynamic inserts are used. Not? Then you already know an additional trick that could stand out from the competition. How to find additional items in ads? By hand or with tools.

Let's show with an example: enter the competitor's domain in the Serpstat search and go to the "Site Analysis - Domain Analysis - PPC Analysis - Keywords" section, special icons will tell you about the presence of additional blocks:

4. Ad History

It's also helpful to look at your competitors' ad history. With this information, you can find out for yourself how often competitors test different ads and which ads perform best. Agree, if a competitor periodically tests new ads, and then returns to the old ones - apparently the tested ones did not bring a positive result.

How do I view competitor ad history?

Let's show with an example: go to the Semrush service, go to the "Domain Analytics - Paid Search Results" section, enter the competitor's domain in the search and open the "History" tab advertisements". Select a period for any month - and voila, you will see the history of ad changes!

5. Landing pages

When evaluating the contextual advertising of competitors, it is important to thoroughly study the landing pages - the pages of the site where the ads lead. Check the quality of these pages, their completeness, what and how they offer, how they stand out and how relevant the page is to the query. If your competitor brings visitors to general pages, you could take this into account and do better - create a separate landing page for the request. How to quickly view the landing pages of competitors?

Let's show with an example: Enter the competitor's domain in Serpstat and go to the "Site Analysis - Domain Analysis - PPC Analysis - Landing Pages" section. Here you will get a complete list of pages where the ads of this competitor lead. It also shows the total number of ads for each individual page.

6. Competitor's budget

I want to note right away that it will not be possible to find out the exact budget of competitors, it will only be possible to calculate its approximate value. No service can give exact data. Nevertheless, even using these numbers, you will benefit for yourself. By finding out how much a competitor pays per click, you can compare their performance with your cost. This will help you find a development vector: either develop towards high-frequency requests (expensive), or pay attention to low-frequency ones and collect cheap traffic.

Let's say your budget is 1,000 rubles, and a competitor has 10,000 rubles. Guess who will show up more and more?

And now how to check the budget of competitors?

Let's show with an example: enter the competitor's domain into Serpstat's search and go to the section "Site analysis - Domain analysis - PPC analysis - Key phrases" and filter the "Cost" indicator from higher to lower. Here we will also get data on the level of competition for the key phrase in percentage terms.

Let's check the cost in Semrush and get the same result.

7. Contextual display advertising

It is very difficult to identify information on display advertising on your own, but services do an excellent job of this. Find out what type of banners your competitors create, where they are placed, and use this data for your own purposes. How to study competitor ads on the Display Network?

Let's show with an example: open the Semrush service, enter a competitor’s domain into the search and select the tab “ Display advertising". Soon we will receive a summary report for the site we are looking for, or an empty report if the domain does not display display ads:

The number of points for analyzing competitors in contextual advertising can be increased depending on the specific task. And having received all the results, combine them into one table in order to take a closer look at all the "chips" of competitors and identify your own weak sides. The work will take a lot of time, but it's worth it.

Inna Velcheva, Serpstat.com

What else is important to know

Regularity. Competitors do not stand still, they work on their advertising campaigns and move forward. You need to keep up with their actions.
At least once a month, do a complete analysis of competitors on all the points listed above. Especially pay attention to the completeness of your list of keywords and keywords of competitors. Find differences. Create a separate table for each competitor. Download the list of his requests and find the latest ones added to the advertising campaign.

Competitor's budget calculation. How can you quickly calculate the budget that a competitor spends on certain keywords?

Download all the necessary key phrases of a competitor to an Excel spreadsheet.
Sort the data by columns: number of impressions, cost and position.
Determine the number of clicks for a specific keyword.
To understand the approximate CTR of a competitor, we look at our data for the same keywords. If your positions are lower than those of a competitor, then adjust the competitor's CTR positively, if it is higher, then negatively.
Based on the CTR, a simple formula in excel counts the number of clicks on a particular keyword.

Clicks = Impressions * CTR

After that, in another column, we multiply the number of received clicks by the cost per click and get the budget for this keyword.
We summarize the data and see the budget that our competitor spends on the keywords that we took for analysis.

In addition to third-party tools, contextual advertising systems themselves also give you the opportunity to learn something about your competitors.

Google AdWords Auction Statistics

Where can you find this report, see the screenshot:

And in the new interface:

What information does this report give you:

A list of sites you are competing with for a specific query or group of queries.
Percentage of impressions received - how many of the hundred possible percent of the impression you received in the selected time period and how much your competitors receive.
The average position of your ads and competitors ads.
Crossover Degree - how often another advertiser's ad was shown at the same time as yours.
Next Position Ratio - How often a competitor's ad is placed above yours while being shown at the same time.
Coefficient for showing above search results - how often your or a competitor's ad was shown above search results (top 4 positions in contextual advertising).
Winning percentage - how often a higher ad ranks higher than a competitor's.

This is what the report will look like:

How to use this report

The more detailed you look, the more accurate the data. Therefore, try to look at the level of keywords, and not the entire account.

To view a report on a word or group, select it with a checkmark and select "Selected", in the new interface you will immediately have an additional panel with a button

If you have a weak relevance of the search query and keyword, then the data will also be less accurate, because the report takes into account all queries that caused an ad to be shown for this keyword.

Often this report answers the question, “Why did CPC go up?” and consequently the effectiveness of the advertising campaign has fallen. Check if a new player has appeared in the auction, maybe other participants have raised prices.

Comparison report in Google Analytics

In Google Analytics, in the audience section, there is a report that allows you to compare the performance of your site with similar sites.

The report is located here:

In the report, you need to configure which sites you want to compare with. To do this, you need to select the industry, region, number of sessions per day.

Set the settings that best suit your site. If you do not have a lot of traffic, then compare yourself separately with those similar in volume to you, and with large niche players.

In the report, you will see comparative figures for the main metrics. For example, from the channel report, you can see not only how much more or less traffic your competitors receive from a paid channel, but in general understand which channels you are lagging behind.

You can also roughly understand how your site is better or worse, on average by niche, in the context of behavioral metrics. If the numbers are not in your favor, then you should not think about increasing the budget for advertising or changing the marketer, but about improving your site.