Display advertising is suffering from two controversial yet die-hard myths. There are those who think display campaigns are all about spraying and praying, and there are those who think \u201cIt has too many settings, I will never have enough time to dig into it.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, with display advertising\u00a0growing in popularity<\/a>\u00a0year over year, we can see that marketers do get profits from this channel.<\/p>\n One of the ways to steer clear of the budget drain in display campaigns is\u00a0competitive analysis<\/a>. Whether you are just planning your first campaign or want to improve your active campaigns, you can find precious insights that will add some extra value to your advertising strategy.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take a look at four aspects to be considered when evaluating competitors\u2019 GDN (Google Display Network) campaigns. We will use the website bicyclewarehouse.com as an example and SEMrush\u2019s Display Advertising report as the main data source.<\/p>\n Display Advertising reports provide data on a domain\u2019s use of online display ads, enabling you to study your key competitors\u2019 banners and text ads placed through Google Ads. There are two options you can choose from to start your research:<\/p>\n You can use the former option if you\u2019re looking to analyze a particular domain and explore the behind-the-scenes details of its advertising profile. On the other hand, if you want to discover ads that are triggered by a certain term or phrase, just type it into the search bar, and you will see ads where this term or phrase was used by any advertiser.<\/p>\n Now let\u2019s delve into it.<\/p>\n Shed light on your rivals’ strategies<\/p>\n With Display Advertising tool<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Selecting\u00a0the right target audience is crucial for a successful display campaign. GDN has many targeting options: you can identify your target customers using interests, demographics, 3rd party data or look-alike technology (for more details about audience targeting explore\u00a0our\u00a0Interactive GDN Campaign\u00a0Checklist<\/a>). However, Google doesn’t\u00a0allow you to access data on your competitors’ audience. Luckily you can find it in SEMrush\u00a0reports.<\/p>\n Our new Audience Targeting widgets will provide you with the following info about your competitors’ customers:<\/p>\n For example, the visitors of\u00a0grammarly.com<\/em>\u00a0are both men and women, aged 25-34 and 35-44, mainly interested in Technology,\u00a0Media & Entertainment, and News & Politics:<\/p>\n On the other hand,\u00a0grammarly.com<\/em>\u00a0as an advertiser is placing its ads on other websites whose audience is mostly interested in Reference, Arts & Entertainment, and Books & Literature:<\/p>\n Understanding the target audience of your rivals can help you expand your own marketing funnel, test new audience combinations and attract more eyeballs to your content.<\/p>\n In GDN, there are several\u00a0types of ads<\/a>: text, image, rich media, etc. By analyzing which format is used more often by your competitors, you can get an idea of the most successful ad types in your niche.<\/p>\n In SEMrush, the ads found on publisher websites are divided into three categories:<\/p>\n We used the\u00a0Advertising Competitors<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Keyword\u00a0Ad\u00a0History<\/a>\u00a0reports to find potential GDN competitors of bicyclewarehouse.com. Let\u2019s take a look at one of them, bikesdirect.com, and see the proportion of ads this domain has ever placed in GDN (since 2013):<\/p>\n And, to see the current ads breakdown, we\u2019ll go to the \u2018Ads\u2019 tab and get an overview of how the situation has been changing over the last 30 days:<\/p>\n We figured out that during the last month this advertiser didn\u2019t run HTML ads at all, but began to show\u00a0some activity in November. It could mean that this format didn\u2019t work well for them, but they had recently decided to give it another try. This is a reason to stop and see if the same is happening to other websites in your niche.<\/p>\n Also, it is\u00a0a signal that this domain may have some well-performing media ads which are worth exploring (and we will get to this later).<\/p>\n If you are running campaigns in different countries, the ‘Location’ filter will provide you with more information to reflect upon. For instance, we found some interesting trends concerning ad formats in the US and the UK:<\/p>\n We see that this advertiser has never used HTML ads for the UK, while in the US this format is widely used. So you might want to dig deeper to see if this is typical for other websites. And if it is, you have two options: stop offering responsive HTML ads to your British customers or, on the contrary, try experimenting with this format in your campaigns for the UK.<\/p>\n We can also search ads by a certain word or phrase. For example, we want to find ads that contain the term \u201cbicycle\u201d. If we type this word into the search bar, we will see the \u201cAds\u201d tab with a list of HTML and text ads in which \u201cbicycle\u201d was used by any advertiser.<\/p>\n In the report, we also see the total number of ads with the word \u201cbicycle\u201d and the Indexed Ads graph showing how actively this term has been used in ads over the last 30 days.<\/p>\n These insights can be a good source of inspiration for your own campaign. By analyzing popular ads that were seen most frequently, you can discover some advertising trends in your niche.<\/p>\n In our\u00a0Display Advertising study<\/a>, we found out that, when running display campaigns, advertisers tend to choose a particular device to target, based on the niche they work in. For example, desktop is the least popular device type among retailers (only 14%), while for software products it’s twice as popular (28%). With this in mind, a thorough analysis of devices which are being targeted in your niche is a must.<\/p>\n To find out which OS and devices your competitors prefer to focus on, use the \u2018Device\u2019 filter in the \u2018Ads\u2019 tab:<\/p>\n Here\u00a0are a couple of insights you can find exploring the competitors of the analyzed domain:<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0Bikesdirect.com<\/em>\u00a0tended to place its HTML ads much more on mobile and tablet devices rather than desktop:<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0Modernbike.com<\/em>\u00a0was generally focusing more on mobile (both Android and Apple):<\/p>\n 3. The same trend can be seen for\u00a0yoeleobike.com<\/em>:<\/p>\n This doesn\u2019t mean that targeting only mobile and tablet users (strictly with HTML ads) will be your silver bullet. But it looks like the hypothesis deserves a test.<\/p>\n Choosing the right targeting option is crucial.<\/p>\n GDN’s ‘thing’ is that it’s automated to a great extent. But this can turn against you (see the picture above). However, you can minimize risks and increase the chances for your ads to appear only on relevant websites.<\/p>\n In Display Advertising report, you can see which websites your competitors are putting their ads on by switching to the \u2018Publishers\u2019 tab:<\/p>\n So, what should you pay attention to when exploring this report? First of all, note the publishers that have been showing the domain\u2019s ads most often. They are worth exploring\u00a0because they are probably driving relevant traffic to your competitor\u2019s website.<\/p>\n Out of these websites\u00a0climbbybike.com<\/em>\u00a0definitely deserves attention:<\/p>\n Click on the number of ads in the first column to explore the ad creatives that were noticed on this publisher\u2019s website:<\/p>\n You can extract more useful data from the \u2018Publishers\u2019 report. Try sorting the list by the \u2018First seen\u2019 criterion to find interesting newly added publishers. The table below will explain in more detail which publishers place which type of ad formats (we noticed that for 8 out of the top 10 publishers of\u00a0bikesdirect.com<\/em>, text ads were the most used ad type):<\/p>\n After you repeat these steps for several competitors and come up with a list of relevant publishers,\u00a0add them as \u2018managed placements\u2019<\/a>\u00a0in Google Ads.<\/p>\n Now that you have an idea on the best formats to choose, devices to target and publishers to whitelist, there is a little left to do: create ads.<\/p>\n Growing your golden pool of CTAs, visuals and unique selling propositions take\u00a0time. It also requires brainstorming sessions, noticeable investments in split tests and hours of analysis.<\/p>\n If you don’t want to go down the long route, consider exploring which of your competitors’ ads are already bringing them traffic. Go to the\u00a0\u2018Ads\u2019 tab<\/a>\u00a0and sort the ad list by ‘Times seen’ to get the (potentially) most effective ones at the top:<\/p>\n For bikesdirect.com, we see that the record-holding media ad has been active since December 2014; however, the last time\u00a0this ad was seen was in December 2017. Clicking on the ad will bring you to the detailed report: you\u2019ll also be able to see the landing page and the list of publishers for this banner.<\/p>\n Switch to the \u2018HTML\u2019 tab to borrow some ideas for \u201cmixed\u201d ads and then to the \u2018Text\u2019 tab to discover the most used calls to action and USPs:<\/p>\n We have analyzed the most popular media ads of five more competitors and came up with some ideas on what messages seem to work best for bike retailers.\u00a0728×90<\/em>\u00a0turned out to be the most frequently used ad size, and the focus on prices and discounts is obvious:<\/p>\n The principles your competitors use for their display advertising are not the ultimate truth you are destined to follow. But a closer look at your competitors\u2019 ad strategies will definitely help you clear things up in terms of how to tweak or not to tweak your campaigns.<\/p>\nWhere to Start<\/h2>\n
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Audience Targeting [New Feature]<\/h2>\n
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Ad Formats<\/h2>\n
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Search by domain<\/h3>\n
Search by keyword<\/h3>\n
Devices<\/h2>\n
Publishers<\/h2>\n
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Live Ad Examples<\/h2>\n
Passing the mic over to you!<\/h2>\n