More than 56% of marketing executives use competitive intelligence to keep a trained eye on their markets, industries, sectors, and their primary competitors, according to the international firm PwC.
The question is: When you do your research and competitor analysis for ad campaigns, what exactly do you look out for?
What should you zoom in on to save time, spend your energy correctly, and optimize competitor analysis for ads?
The key to competitive benchmarking and competitor analysis is to learn, not copy.
While learning from your competitors is important, it's also important to be original. Don't just copy what they're doing.
Instead, use their strategies as inspiration to create better campaigns.
In this article, I’ll go into how to identify your ecommerce competitor’s best ads and how to learn from their ads. Let’s dive in!
5 Things to Do When You Identify Your Competitor’s Best Ads
Find Angles, Hooks, and Triggers
Your competitors are already running ads (across networks such as Google, Meta, Google Shopping, and elsewhere).
Ask these questions:
- What kind of ads are they running?
- What traffic sources or platforms do they spend the most on?
- More specifically, what are the angles, hooks, and triggers that your competitors seem to use?
- What do those ads say? How are they saying it?
- What do you think is the primary objective of those ads or campaigns?
Find them. List them. You can use them all later.
Copy and Rework Best Ad Hooks
Some hooks and angles work better than others. You also have no way to know what works and what doesn’t unless you split-test your campaigns.
Regardless, these ads run by your competitors give you massive clues on what’s working, what’s not, and even the mistakes you should avoid.
Talking about mistakes.
Here’s an example (thanks to Chris Long, VP of Marketing at Go Fish Digital):
Men’s Warehouse uses a boilerplate template for their Google Ads.
While it might seem like a way to save time and resources, it looks like a half-hearted attempt to get their ads up and running.
Only copy or adopt what you think is a great idea (including offers, hooks, and calls to action).
Not everything that your competition does is right by default.
Find New Audiences To Target
We all struggle with confirmation bias in marketing. Confirmation bias, in terms of target audiences, could sound something like “We know who buys from us because they are the ones who’ve always been buying from us”.
But the thing is, you never know. With changing demographics, increasing globalization, and borderless marketplaces, you can’t assume target audiences.
Some hooks and angles work better than others. You also have no way to know what works and what doesn’t unless you split-test your campaigns.
Thankfully, one glance at a few campaigns your competitors run could open your eyes to the new target audiences, countries, markets, languages, and niche subsets within a larger market base that your competitors are reaching out to
Don’t assume your way to a brick wall.
Identify and Learn From Their Landing Pages & Funnels
What’s next? This point, right here, is called “post-click marketing”. Determining where your visitors go “after clicking on an ad” is part art and part science unto itself.
Your task is to find out what happens after someone clicks on the ad your competitor is running.
Two things will happen at that point: You’ll be inspired to see how well-crafted and optimized their funnels, marketing workflows, and landing pages are…
...or you’ll find that the ads lead straight to their online store (telling you exactly what you shouldn’t do).
Take notes on how landing pages look, what they seem to communicate, landing page copy, how they are built, what the call-to-action is, and more.
Look out for intermediary pages, thank you pages and additional pages used for upsells and cross-selling.
Copy or Rework From Their Creative Content Mix
When you look through various campaigns run by a diverse set of brands worldwide, you’ll notice patterns. You’ll also stumble across crafty copywriting, design, styles, angles, hooks, and offers.
Don’t just gawk at what inspires you. Create dedicated lists for each sector/industry/business vertical/campaign type and add a variety of content mixes to these lists.
The content mix could include designs, writing, ads, messages, videos, testimonials, user-generated content, and more.
If you need help with competitive intelligence and a structured competitive analysis framework, we have a helpful template for competitive analysis that you can use
Get a complete, fluid, and detailed picture of your competition with Panoramata, a tool purpose-built for easy competitive analysis.
Get the ability to quickly browse through hundreds of brands across sectors and industries.
Build swipe lists with inspiring email marketing campaigns, SMS marketing rollouts, landing page design, website & SEO profiles, and more.
How to Analyze Your Competitor’s Ecommerce Ads
Here’s how to learn from your competitors’ ads in e-commerce specifically:
Identify Different Kinds of Ads Competitors Run
Look for the exact type of ads your competitors run such as
- banner ads
- Gmail ads
- video ads
- YouTube ads
- social media ads (including specific platforms)
For each of the ads, creatives, and campaigns you spot, be sure to look at the comments under the ads to get a sense of what your target audience wants.
Further, look for social proof, the benefits of some of the products your competitors are highlighting, whether the ads are riding some new social media trends, etc.
While looking at the ads themselves, also look out for the ad angles, creative line of thought, offers, sales funnels, landing pages, and more.
You can get a snapshot of most of the campaigns your competitors run (including email campaigns, landing pages, ads, and more) by using a single tool such as Panoramata. It tracks your competitor’s campaigns and feeds all the latest updates into a dashboard that’s updated in real time.
Each ad, email, and even landing page on Panoramata can be downloaded and saved into a shareable list so you can refer to them later or share them with your team.
Extract Key Insights
The real effort kicks in when you have to extract key insights and use them to your advantage.
You’ll need a strategy to unlock competitor intelligence, and you can achieve that by taking the time for it and with the help of several tools available (free, paid, and freemium).
Using a tool like Panoramata, you can build handy lists to keep track of your competition.
Several other tools can help you with competitor tracking including social media listening tools, brand monitoring tools, media intelligence tools, and more.
You’d want to look for insights such as the various digital channels your competitors use and how they use each of these channels.
Answer these questions:
- What are your competitors doing on social media?
- What kind of content are they creating, sharing, and distributing?
- How are they interacting with their followers?
This information can help you develop your own social media marketing strategy, for instance.
Adapt Competitor Strategies to Your Own Business
Once you get a fair understanding of the various digital channels that your competitors use (and how they use each of those), you have your work cut out for you.
Launch on the channels (but make data-driven decisions about investing resources on each channel) and strive to make your campaigns better.
Are your competitors using content marketing to their advantage? Do your competitors have a leg up on search results with dedicated work being done for their search engine optimization?
Are any of your competitors also tapping into other digital channels such as using influencer marketing and affiliate marketing, or are they focusing on developing channel partners?
By tuning in and listening to chatter on social media (about your own brand and also about your competitors, you get insights into what’s working, what your customers want, what they struggle with, and more).
By using tools like Panoramata and taking a quick look at your competitors’ email marketing campaigns, for instance, you can build out better campaigns with more compelling copy, better designs, and a calibrated (and strategic) email marketing strategy by incorporating best practices.
Improve Over Time (Optimize and Test)
Your campaigns (across channels and for various goals) are never “one-time” work.
You’d have to roll out campaigns (along with creatives, copy, funnels, offers, call-to-action prompts, and more) and then tweak and test to see what works.
With enough sample size (number of people your campaigns reach out to), you’ll be in a better position to implement advanced strategies such as A/B testing and understand what works, weed out what doesn’t seem to work, and make progress.
FAQs
1. How can I learn from my competitor's ads?
Analyze your competitor’s ad creative, messaging, and targeting to understand what resonates with their audience. Look for strong angles and hooks they use to capture attention, which can inspire your own campaigns.
2. What are the best ways to identify a competitor's top-performing ads?
You can use ad transparency tools on platforms like Facebook’s Ad Library or tools like Panoramata to see their ad history across different networks including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. Look for ads with high engagement, as these likely perform well and reveal effective strategies.
3. How can I apply insights from competitor ads to my e-commerce strategy?
Use the information to create similar or improved ads targeting the same or adjacent audiences. Tailor your ad copy, visuals, and offers to tap into discovered angles, highlighting unique benefits to stand out from competitors.
