What Is Paid Search Analysis?

Paid search is a form of digital marketing where advertisers pay a fee each time their advertisement is clicked on. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than earning those visits organically through search engine optimization (SEO).

The most popular form of paid search is search engine advertising, wherein advertisers bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links when someone searches for a keyword related to their business offering. When done correctly, the ad will appear at the top of search results, increasing visibility and potentially driving more traffic to the advertiser’s website.

Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is the most well-known platform for paid search, but other search engines like Bing and Yahoo also offer similar advertising opportunities.

So now you are clear on the above, let’s continue.

Paid search analysis is the process of examining and evaluating the performance of your paid search campaigns to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. This analysis involves assessing various metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, cost per click, and return on investment (ROI).

By delving deep into these metrics, advertisers can understand how well their ads are performing, where their budget is best allocated, and which keywords or strategies drive the most valuable traffic.

The insights gained from a paid search analysis allow businesses to optimize their campaigns, ensuring that they achieve the best possible results for their advertising spend. This includes paid search competitor analysis, which we will cover later in this article.

Check out this video below that gives you a flavour of how to use SEMRUSH to look at your competitors.

Firstly there is analysing your own Paid Search Ads (goes without saying, but this is your first priority).

Now, if you are preparing paid search ad campaigns, you will want to look at your competitors and in essence spy on what they are doing, what keywords they are targeting, what search terms they are spending the most money on and review the landing pages that they are driving the traffic to.

If there is a competitor who is a standout, market leader, then there will be a lot you can learn from their activities, ad copy, marketing strategy, various PPC campaigns, lead generation strategy and pay per click tactics.

But, it’s not about copying the competition, as you know, it’s about beating the competition and having competitive advantages, maybe you specialize in an area they don’t or your landing page has better UI or CTAs, copy or trust signals to encourage the new potential clients to get in touch.

– Get yourself a tool that can analyse your paid search and also keyword research, if it’s existing ads, you can use all the Google AdWords tools from your account. If you are looking to spy on your competitors, which we highly recommend you do, you can conduct a fantastic competitive analysis from tools such as SEMRUSH or SimilarWeb which have excellent software to give you all the information you need to make your own informed decision on changes to your ads and the wider strategy.

– Once you compiled the data, it’s now down to your summary, review and action plan to improve your existing ads or create a new campaign based on the data insights from your research.

After all, what’s the point in doing all this hard work if you can’t implement the insights and benefit from the changes?

Think about your target audience, where you are positioned in the market, pricing offers or temporary incentives or added value to entice engagement and lead gen conversions. Running AB tests on specific ads is a good way to zone in on lean conversion rates and save on your ad spend.

Getting yourself the right PPC strategy can be challenging, so if you need support, help or to completely outsource your paid search to an Agency, we would be more than happy to discuss helping you grow.

Simply, get in touch with Ben or one of his team and let’s set up a meeting.