Google Ads Competitor Analysis: Tools and Tips

Advertising is the engine of commerce. All entrepreneurs and companies advertise their products or services. Advertising can be done in various ways: on social media and messengers, in newspapers, on radio and TV, and on websites. However, contextual advertising networks like Google Ads traditionally demonstrate the highest effectiveness.

Below, we will discuss how to conduct Google Ads competitor research (formerly AdWords), what to pay attention to, the approaches and nuances involved, and whether automation tools exist.

Why Competitor Analysis Matters in Google Ads

Any competitor analysis is an attempt to understand the market better. The more you know about your rivals, the easier it is to develop a competitive strategy. Let’s break down the reasons for conducting Google Ads competitor analysis step by step:

• Identifying Competitors' Strengths and Weaknesses. By analyzing advertising campaigns, you can gather essential data about competitors’ offerings and key strategies (what they focus on). These might include effective keywords, appealing media ads, unique selling propositions, or specific ad formats. Understanding what works for others allows you to enhance your campaigns. Knowing competitors’ weaknesses enables you to avoid their mistakes and leverage opportunities to strengthen your position.
• Evaluating Budget and Bids. While Google has made budget analysis more challenging, you can still estimate competitors’ ad investments using average bid estimates (the ones shown for similar queries). This gives you an idea of their advertising expenses, helping you adjust your budget and strategy to remain competitive without overspending.
• Understanding Target Audiences. Competitors may target specific audience segments you hadn’t considered. Analyzing their Google Ads campaigns can reveal insights that help expand your reach or focus on the most promising segments.
• Optimizing Keywords. Understanding which keywords competitors use helps optimize your keyword lists. You can add new relevant queries, exclude less effective ones, or focus on long-tail keywords, which are less competitive and often more cost-effective.
• Monitoring Strategy Changes. Regularly monitoring competitors' activity allows you to track changes in their advertising strategies. If a competitor suddenly alters the approach, it could indicate emerging trends or market shifts that you should respond to promptly.

• Crafting a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). You can identify what separates your offering by studying competitors' ad messages. This helps you create a USP that attracts more customers. As a result, your ads will become more successful.
• Creating Effective Ads. Google Ads competitor analysis shows which approaches work best. Use this insight to develop more appealing and clickable ads for your campaigns.

Key Metrics to Focus On

Advertising strategies are challenging to describe with specific numerical indicators. However, there is still something we can offer:

• Display Share.is defined as the percentage of all ad displays in Google search results for a specific keyword query. The metric can be analyzed over a specific time period (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). Additionally, it’s important to consider the device type (mobile or desktop) and and geographic location (city, region, country).
• Keywords and Their Search Volume. The more popular a keyword (the higher its search volume), the more expensive the advertising becomes. Knowing the approximate search frequency of each keyword allows you to estimate the advertising budget - yours and your competitors.
• Other Query Metrics. Google’s Keyword Planner provides data on conversion rates (the ratio of clicks to impressions) and estimated costs (average bids).
• Number of Advertisements by Competitor. The more ads a competitor runs, the broader the range of queries they aim to cover. It’s helpful to categorize these ads by format and platform, such as text, media, mobile, or desktop.
• Position in Google Organic Search. It helps estimate the share of paid traffic in a particular niche and analyze effective promotion strategies. For instance, if a major competitor like Amazon ranks 5th organically for a query like "Buy a TV" but also runs ads for the same keyword, it suggests that the 5th position in organic results is insufficient for capturing targeted traffic. To succeed, you must rank in the top 3 organically or invest in paid ads to secure a prominent spot.
• Average Price in Google Merchant Center. This metric helps evaluate the competitiveness of your offers. Google calculates median values based on competitor pricing data, making it easy to compare your prices against those of competitors.

Essential Tools for Google Ads Competitor Analysis

It would be naive to assume that competitors or Google would simply reveal their strategies. That’s not how it works. Get ready to gather data with effort - piecemeal, from various sources.

Listed below are the primary Google Ads competitor analysis tools and platforms:

Google Ads Keyword Planner

This is Google’s native tool, and it is free. The official web page with a description. It comes with several other valuable features for advertisers available by default:

• Reach planner;
• Audience manager (for segmenting potential clients);
• Data manager (for uploading data from external sources);
• Performance planner (for precise forecasting of advertising expenses).

With the Keyword Planner, you can:

1. Find new keywords;
2. Automatically determine niche relevance and filter out unnecessary keywords based on website content (yours and that of your competitors);
3. Customize the geography and language of the keyword choice (for example, at the country or city level). The tool also provides an approximate reach estimate, indicating the number of users engaged with Google search;
4. Access detailed numerical data, such as:
• Average monthly search volume.
• Trends over the past quarter or year.
• Competition level.
• Percentage of paid ad impressions.
• Minimum and maximum cost-per-click (CPC).
5. Download information in CSV format or integrate it with Google Sheets for analysis.

These features are sufficient to estimate campaign costs or understand competitors' ad expenditures.

Google Ad Transparency Center

This tool allows you to complete a more in-depth competitor analysis in Google Ads by studying the scope of actual advertisements. Simply enter the company name, and the service will display all previously published ad blocks (excluding the services of intermediaries, which adds to the quality of the study).

Regular ads are generally stored for one year, while political ads are stored for up to seven years. The service does not display ads by unverified advertisers. Plus, tech delays are possible because of processing nuances—up to three days.

Many new ads may even come with display quantity metrics.

As for the rest of the features, you can see how the ads are displayed, their number, the platforms they are displayed on, and their formats (text, graphics, video). You can use filters by date/time, Google platforms (search, YouTube, Maps, Purchases, etc.), and geographical targeting (currently available down to the country) for more quality choices.

The Official Service Web Page

Google Ads Bid Simulator

This is a built-in Google Ads tool that can be launched when selecting specific keywords, campaigns, or ad groups in your advertising account. A special script simulates potential click and bid metrics to calculate an estimated budget (advertising expenses).

The simulator's forecasts are based on statistics from other clients and traffic analysis for specific keywords, making them reasonably accurate.

You can adjust your bids and see the outcomes these changes may lead to.

Tool Guide.

Google Merchant Center

This service is designed to store data about your products and their prices. The information is displayed across various Google products.

The most interesting feature for competitor analysis in Google Ads is a unique report in the Merchant Center Analytics section—the "Pricing" tab. This report provides aggregated statistics on the prices of similar products competitors offer. Google automatically analyzes this data. Comparisons are based on median values: current (up-to-date) prices and historical (all-time observed) prices.

Another valuable report is "Best Sellers." It provides insights into top-performing products and their prices within your niche or category.

Froxy SERP Scraper

This is a turnkey implementation of a web scraper for Google search results. There’s no need for coding or CAPTCHA-solving here. You simply enter your query, define targeting parameters (region, city, user device type), and receive ready-made data in CSV or JSON format. Results can be downloaded via your account dashboard or accessed through an API.

Since queries are sent through mobile or residential proxies, you get results identical to those seen by regular users in the selected location - whether on smartphones or desktops.

Scraping of the most popular Google products is supported here: Ads, SERP (organic search), Maps, Trends, Images, Cache, and Search Suggestions. Additionally, there’s a tool for tracking the rankings of specific websites.

If needed, scraping tasks can be made periodical and useful for ongoing monitoring.

Pricing and plans for Froxy SERP scraper

Product Documentation

Third-Party Tools

Analyzing competitors in Google Ads is not new, so many businesses are considering automating it. To be precise, ready-made tools and datasets are available online for effective research. As the saying goes, "Knowledge is power."

Some of the most valuable tools and services for competitor analysis include:

• SEMrush. This is a comprehensive online service for collecting marketing data from the web. PPC Toolkit can be used to analyze competitors’ ad campaigns in Google Ads. The tool provides the Advertising Research for detailed reports (summarized data about paid searches for specific websites). You can see the estimated number of keywords, paid traffic costs, and approximate visitor numbers of your competitors. There are copies of ad creatives and ad display history for more advanced analytics.
• Ahrefs is a versatile marketing analytics platform with numerous tools for exploring the online market. Site Explorer works best for analyzing Google Ads competitors. The tool provides in-depth insights into paid traffic, including keywords and their associated bids, the ratio of paid traffic to organic traffic, website ranking positions for specific keywords, and landing pages linked to ads.
• SpyFu is another comprehensive service for monitoring SEO and marketing metrics. Here, you can find a more in-depth competitor analysis in Google Ads: keyword and phrase lists used in competitors' ads, number of ad clicks, cost-per-click estimates (based on Google Keyword Planner bids), budget monitoring over time (dynamic expense tracking), full history of competitors’ ad campaigns, etc.

Custom Google Ads Competitor Analysis Tool

Technically, nothing prevents you from manually monitoring competitors in search results. You can check their ad sets and the URLs where their contextual ads lead. Moreover, you can test various hypotheses, such as whether and how competitor retargeting works. For instance, you can visit their site from different devices, perform specific actions, and then evaluate how their ads change for you. You’ll likely encounter ads encouraging you to return and complete a purchase.

However, you’ll quickly realize that:

1. You don’t have enough devices to evaluate the reach and geographic coverage of your competitors effectively;
2. Collecting data manually takes too much time and effort.

Automation is inevitable if you want your research to scale and provide actionable insights. Without it, the data you collect will be sparse and insufficient for drawing conclusions or making managerial decisions.

In this case, automation means developing a parser capable of connecting through proxies and collecting data from search results, both organic and paid.

Proxies are required here to:

• Substitute the location in specific regions or areas;
• Mimic desktop or mobile devices as needed;
• Avoid blocks and CAPTCHAs (frequent CAPTCHAs require additional budgets for solving them via specialized services);
• Maintain confidentiality;
• Parallelize data collection across multiple threads (to significantly speed up analysis when handling many queries).

Google SERP involves specific proxy requirements:

• Proxies should rotate based on time, command/API, or for each new request;
• They must offer a wide range of IPs in the target location, ensuring accuracy and a sufficient number of available IPs;
• Proxies should operate quickly, with minimal delay between rotations;
• They should provide access to diverse address types (mobile, residential/domestic, and datacenter).

We can provide precisely such proxies! Check out our range of proxies and pricing.

Building your own Google SERP parser has been covered separately: Using Scraper to Collect Google Search Data.

Conclusion

Competitor analysis in Google Ads is essential to market and niche research. However, this work is rarely a one-time effort. Businesses should continuously monitor key competitor metrics to stay on trend and seize emerging opportunities.

While Google provides several specialized tools and reports, much of the work still needs to be done manually—either by using dedicated services or custom-built parsers.

Custom parsers, however, require proxy use and multiple computational resources. Without programming skills, you won’t be able to develop and maintain your parser in a functional and up-to-date condition. It makes sense to use a ready-made parser like Froxy SERP Scraper instead.