Analyze, Optimize, Win: A Smarter Approach to Paid Search Campaigns

If you’re playing darts and you hit a bullseye while wearing a blindfold, people will be impressed. But you’re much more likely to miss the board entirely, hit a server and be not-so-kindly asked to leave the establishment.

Embarking on a paid search campaign without a competitive analysis is kind of like playing darts blindfolded. Except nobody will applaud if you hit a proverbial bullseye. So let’s take the blindfold off and figure out how to conduct an effective paid search analysis. 

What Is a Paid Search Analysis?

A paid search analysis involves collecting and analyzing data from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns to better understand performance, identify trends and improve future outcomes. An analysis consists of tracking key metrics such as clicks, conversions and costs on platforms (like Google Ads) to determine if the campaign is delivering a positive return on investment (ROI). The analysis often includes competitor research to provide a context for refining ad copy, keywords and bidding strategies. 

The Importance of PPC

PPC is a core tenet of paid marketing in the digital age. It’s an effective advertising model because it incentivizes both the company that’s advertising and the platform that displays the ad to succeed. For example, if a Google ad does poorly and generates very few clicks, then Google doesn’t make much money from it, so internally the company may review how and when it displays the ad. 

For advertisers, PPC is low-risk because you don’t pay a lot for unsuccessful ads. But of course, a successful ad is always the goal. To make paid search marketing work, it’s often necessary to conduct analytics research — and that’s where paid search analyses come in.

Analyzing Your Own Campaigns

One great thing about digital marketing is that it offers myriad in-depth analytics to better understand ad performance. Advertising on a search engine is an effective way to generate leads — if your paid search campaign gets seen by the right people. For example, if your Bing ads aren’t getting in front of enough eyeballs, or they’re not closely aligned with search intent, then they probably won’t help your bottom line.

That’s why it’s important to interrogate your marketing strategy, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and your paid search campaign. But when you examine your digital marketing strategy, you have to know what to look for.

Key Metrics to Track

There are significant differences when analyzing organic search vs. paid search, but both types of analytics rely on tracking the right metrics. 

When assessing ads that appear on search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s valuable to measure the success of a given ad by assessing its quantitative and qualitative aspects, as well as its cost. Here are the important metrics to evaluate when judging a paid search campaign. 

• Impressions: The number of times somebody sees your ad.
• Impression share: The percentage of impressions your ads received compared to the number they were eligible to receive.
• Clicks: The total number of times somebody clicked on your ad.
• Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of impressions that result in a click. For example, if 5,000 people see an ad, and 750 click on it, the ad has a CTR of 15%. (This would be a very strong CTR.)
• Conversions: The number of desired actions taken by people who see your ad, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
• Average position: Where your ad typically appears on the SERP. 
• Cost-per-click (CPC): The average amount you pay for each click. 
• Conversion rate: The percentage of clicks that result in a conversion. For example, if out of every 750 clicks, 100 people make a purchase, your ad has a conversion rate of 13.3%.
• Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): The cost to acquire one conversion or customer. (Not to be confused with traffic acquisition, which pertains to driving traffic to your website, regardless of conversion rate.)
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): The total revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. A low CPA correlates with a good ROAS.
• Quality score: This is Google’s rating of your ad’s quality and relevance, which affects ad position and cost.

These are the metrics that will define your paid search analytics. Keep in mind that not all are necessarily crucial key performance indicators (KPIs) for your analysis. You may have unique goals for your paid search ads. For example, while conversions are always good, maybe you’re concentrating more on top-of-funnel leads and just trying to get more people to notice your website. In such a case, impressions may matter to you more than they do to another organization whose search engine marketing is primed to boost sales.

Furthermore, much of what we’ve discussed pertains to Google ads and Bing ads (and DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, etc), but not all PPC campaigns focus only on SERPs. These KPIs can also be valuable for evaluating Facebook ads and various Microsoft ads. 

Now that you know which metrics to track … how do you track them? For that, you need the right tool.

Tools for Effective Paid Search Tracking

Thankfully, there are many PPC tools at your disposal. Unfortunately, that also makes choosing the right PPC analysis tool for your purposes a bit tricky. You don’t want to simply opt for the first option you see and end up with a tool that doesn’t really allow you to find the best keyword or search term for your ads. Then again, PPC has become so involved, it’s difficult to know if you need something more sophisticated for your purposes, like AI tools.

Don’t worry. Here’s a brief overview of some of the most popular paid search analytics tools:

• Google Ads: We’re talking about paid search and SEO, so it makes sense to start with Google Ads, the native platform for Google’s paid search campaigns. This tool provides direct access to campaign data, keyword performance and auction insights — which can provide valuable insight for your bidding strategy for an ad on a Google search results page.
• Google Analytics 4 (GA4): Google Analytics goes beyond Ads, tracking user behavior on your website and analyzing the performance of your PPC campaigns. GA4 integrates seamlessly with Google Ads. 
• Semrush: Semrush provides a suite of tools for keyword research, competitive ad insights and campaign performance tracking. It’s useful for tracking metrics across platforms, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
• PPC Entourage: This tool offers a variety of useful features specifically designed for Amazon ads. It’s a good option for any digital marketer just getting started with PPC advertising.
• AdEspresso: Ideal for running PPC ads across social platforms and Google Ads, AdEspresso excels at A/B testing. You can test ad messaging, visuals and audience targeting. 
• SpyFu: This tool is ideal for competitive analysis because it lets you “spy” on the competition. At least to the extent that it gives you a look behind the scenes and helps you understand competitor rankings and ad variations.

How To Identify Your Competitors

To understand your PPC competitors, you can manually search for your target keywords. Look for who consistently appears in the ads. Then, you can use paid search tools — such as Google Ads Auction Insights, Semrush or SpyFu — to get a more complete list of businesses bidding on the same keywords you are. You can also analyze competitor ad performance and online presence to gain deeper insights into what you’re up against. 

Analyzing Your Competitors

You can break down a PPC competitor analysis into 6 steps. These are:

1. Perform keyword research: Search for your most important keywords on Google, Bing, Ecosia, etc.
2. Use Auction Insights: Run an auction insights report (available on platforms such as Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising) to get a competitive view of the ad auctions in which you participate.
3. Review SERPs: Which businesses regularly appear in the ads near your own?
4. Review competitor ads: What do their ads look like? What about their landing pages and ad copy? What does this tell you about their digital marketing strategy and brand messaging?
5. Check online presence: Review your competition’s broader online presence, including their social media, to get a fuller picture of their marketing strategies.
6. Gather performance data: You can use the same tools mentioned above to conduct a competitive PPC analysis.
   

Free PPC Checklist

Here’s a checklist to help you cover the fundamental areas to review in any comprehensive paid search campaign analysis:

1. Core Tracking and Financial Review

• Verify conversion tracking.
• Analyze budget and pacing.
• Review KPI performance.

2. Account Structure and Campaign Settings

• Review campaign segmentation and ad group structure.
• Assess geographic targeting and ad scheduling.

3. Keyword Optimization and Maintenance

• Analyze search term reports.
• Evaluate exact and broad keyword matches.
• Assess quality scores.

4. Ad Copy and Landing Page Analysis

• Pause low-performance ads.
• Ensure all headlines and descriptions utilize relevant keywords and feature a strong call-to-action.
• Confirm that the landing page content matches the ad copy and user search intent.
• Check mobile and desktop page speeds.
• Analyze user behavior metrics, such as bounce rate and time-on-page, to identify bottlenecks in the conversion funnel.

5. Competitive Benchmarking

• Use the auction insights report to identify your true PPC competitors.
• Analyze impression share, overlap rate, and outranking share against key rivals.
• Search priority keywords to review competitor ad copy.
• Identify potential keyword gaps where competitors are bidding.

Ready To Assess Your PPC Efforts?

Conducting a PPC competitor analysis can seem complicated, but as with all techniques and tools, the more you use them, the more comfortable and adept you will become. Also, unlike darts, paid search doesn’t have to be an individual sport. You can partner with others to form a great team around you.