Running a paid search competitive analysis doesn’t mean you need access to a rival’s account. We piece it together from Auction Insights, the Ads Transparency Center, a keyword tool or two and some old-fashioned searching, then check what each one says against the others, because any single source on its own will mislead you.
I’ve never once had a competitor offer up their Google Ads login. Can’t think why.
But clients ask the question anyway, usually in the middle of a call when CPCs have gone a bit mad, and it’s some version of “what are they doing that we’re not?” I won’t pretend we can see everything. We can’t. What we can see is more than most people assume, because competitors leave a trail. Their ads are out in public, so are their landing pages, and how often they bump into you in the auction is already sitting in your own account waiting for someone to look.
The usual shortcut is to buy a tool, look at the spend estimate it spits out, and call it a day. I get why. The trouble is those estimates are sometimes nowhere near the truth, so the whole analysis ends up built on a guess. What we do instead takes a little longer and goes roughly like this.
Where Do You Start a Paid Search Competitive Analysis?
Your own Auction Insights report. I start there every time because the data comes out of Google’s real auctions, the ones you actually took part in, rather than from a third party trying to reverse-engineer it.
It lists the domains competing in your auctions and shows how often. I mainly look at impression share, overlap rate (how often they show when you show), position above rate (how often they’re sitting above you) and outranking share, meaning how often you either beat them or appear when they don’t.
Don’t just pull it at account level. Break it down by campaign and stretch the date range over a few months. Once we had a competitor go from about 20 percent overlap to 60 percent in eight weeks on one campaign, and that kind of jump is never random. Somebody on their side raised bids or budget, or decided to go after those keywords on purpose. If you catch it in week three you can respond. If you catch it in month three you’re mostly just explaining to a client why their costs went up.
How Do You See What Competitors Are Actually Saying in Their Ads?
Go to the Google Ads Transparency Center. It costs nothing and it’s open to anyone, and I’m still surprised how few people bother with it.
You type in an advertiser and it shows you their live ads, which you can filter by region, date and format. So you get their headlines, whatever offer they’re pushing this month, how often the messaging changes and any seasonal promotions you’d otherwise have missed completely. I’ve caught competitors quietly adding “free consultation” across every ad in a market this way, weeks before anyone on the client side noticed.
After that I’d honestly just search. Open an incognito window, try your main keywords on your phone and on a laptop, ideally from the cities you’re targeting, and make a note of who comes up, what their ads say and where you end up when you click. It’s about as low-tech as research gets. Plenty of teams have still never looked at the results page their customers are staring at every single day.
What Can Keyword and Spend Tools Tell You, and What Can’t They?
SEMRush, SpyFu and tools like them estimate which keywords your competitors bid on and give you a ballpark on spend. I like them for finding keywords nobody on our side had thought about, and for getting a feel for how big a competitor’s operation might be.
I just wouldn’t take the spend figure literally. These tools are modelling from whatever they’re able to scrape, and the number can be off by a lot. If a tool tells me a competitor is spending $40,000 a month while Auction Insights only shows them in 15 percent of our auctions, I believe Auction Insights and treat the tool as a rough pointer.
Keyword Planner is worth opening too. It won’t tell you anything about competitors directly, but once you’ve got a list of keywords from the other tools it gives you volume and bid ranges, which makes it a lot easier to decide what’s worth competing on and what would just eat budget.
The best competitive analysis we run isn’t based on any single tool. It’s based on noticing when three different sources point at the same thing. If Auction Insights shows a competitor’s overlap rising, the Transparency Center shows new offers in their ads, and their landing page suddenly has a new form, that’s not a coincidence. That’s a strategy, and now you can respond to it.
— Vishal Singh, Performance Marketing Specialist
Why Should You Look at Their Landing Pages Too?
The ad gets the click, but the page is where they’ve put their real bet on what makes someone convert, so it tells you a lot more.
Click through from a regular search and not from your own account, otherwise you’re messing with your own data. Then take your time with it. I look at what the main offer is, how many fields the form has, whether they want a phone number or only an email, whether there’s pricing or a free trial or a demo button or WhatsApp, and how long the thing takes to load on my phone.
Sometimes the answer is right there. If their page is faster and simpler and asks for less, their conversion rate is probably higher than yours, which means each click is worth more to them and they can afford to bid higher. We’ve had accounts where the client wanted to raise bids to keep up, and what actually needed fixing was our own landing page.
How Do You Turn All of This Into Something Useful?
I keep everything in one sheet. A row per competitor with their overlap rate, how often they rank above us, their main ad messages, the offer, what type of landing page they use, and a column for anything that changed since last month.
Then I go through it asking where they’re ahead of us and whether that’s actually costing us anything, where we’re ahead and whether we could lean into it more, and what they’re doing that we’ve never tried. That last question is the one that usually turns up the most useful ideas.
We repeat it every month. A one-off is out of date within about six weeks, whereas a monthly check starts showing you patterns, like the competitor who always ramps up just before one particular season, or the one who launches a new offer, tests it for a fortnight and quietly drops it. Tracking that as a routine job is part of what good search engine marketing services should be doing for you anyway.
Your Own Data vs Third-Party Tools, Which One Should You Trust?
For accuracy I’d trust Auction Insights, since it only reports on auctions you were actually in. That’s also its weak spot. If a competitor is bidding on keywords you don’t target, they won’t appear in your report at all.
Third-party tools are the opposite in a way. They cover a much wider spread of keywords and competitors, including ones you haven’t run into yet, but the spend and traffic numbers are estimates and the quality varies a lot.
In practice we use our own data whenever we’re deciding bids and budgets on keywords we already run, and we use the tools when we’re scouting for new keywords or competitors, checking anything they suggest before we act on it.
Questions We Get Asked About Paid Search Competitor Research
Q1. Can you see exactly how much a competitor spends on Google Ads?
Ans. No. Nobody outside that business can. Tools will give you an estimate and Auction Insights tells you how often you’re up against them, but the real spend figure stays private. You can usually tell whether they’re spending more or less than they were, and most of the time that’s enough to work with.
Q2. Should you bid on a competitor's brand name?
Ans. It’s allowed, as long as you’re not using their trademark in your ad copy in a way that goes against Google’s policies. Whether it pays off is another matter. Those clicks are often expensive and don’t convert well, because someone searching for a brand usually wants that brand. I’d test it on a small budget before committing.
Q3. How often should a competitive analysis be done?
Ans. We check Auction Insights and the Transparency Center monthly and do a fuller review each quarter that includes landing pages and the keyword tools. We also check straight away if CPCs suddenly jump, since that’s often the first hint that a new competitor has entered your auctions.
Written by Vishal Singh, Performance Marketing Specialist
I manage Google Ads accounts in a range of industries, and competitor research is one of the first things I look at when costs start shifting without an obvious explanation. There’s almost always an explanation, and more often than not it’s in Auction Insights.
If you’re comparing agencies for the best search engine marketing services, ask how they track competitors month to month. You can see how we approach it on our search engine marketing services page.
