Paid Media Competitors

“What are our competitors doing?”

If you work in paid media, you’ve probably had a team member or client ask you this at least once (but I’m willing to bet it’s been a lot more than once).

Analyzing competitor activity has its pros and cons, so I’m breaking down where I’ve found benefits and pitfalls over the course of my career below.

Competitor Research Can Be Great For Inspiration

Researching competitor activity can be a great way to find some inspiration. I’ve found it easy to slip into marketing tunnel vision at times, so seeing different strategies and tactics can be helpful to shake things up in your brainstorming sessions.

Whether it’s a different creative angle, landing page style, or even lead magnet, competitors can be a useful source of fresh perspectives given the similar audience they are also targeting.

Competitors Don’t Always Know What They’re Doing

While competitor research can be great for inspiration, I’d caution against emulating competitors just because they’re a big name, or doing something differently.

It can be fairly safe to assume direct competitors are targeting the same audience as you, however there are many factors we can’t see when conducting competitor research. Just because an ad on Meta has been running for a few months doesn’t mean it’s working well. I’ve seen under the hood of some “top” brands, and sometimes even they don’t have the proper measurement methodologies in place to understand what is or isn’t working.

My recommendation is evaluate competitor tactics, then consider if those approaches are relevant to your brand based on your own processes and strategies.

ChatGPT Can Help Find Opportunities With Competitor Analysis

A resourceful method of evaluating what competitors are doing well (and not so well) is turning to ChatGPT or similar AI tools. I recommend using an AI tool that has a live connection to the internet for this research method.

I like to use tools like ChatGPT to summarize both positive and negative competitor reviews, then break down the main points of these reviews into themes. This helps me to create a matrix of services or features that customers care enough about to take time out of their day to leave a review on the topic.

This can be a great way to find market opportunities based on common negative review points across competitors.

Competitor Search Campaigns Can Be Tricky

Lastly, I want to touch on good ol’ competitor search campaigns.

In my experience, I’ve observed that:

• Targeting pure competitor brand names generally results in an inefficient return when using last-touch attribution. If possible, I’d recommend testing the incrementality of these efforts.

• Targeting competitor brand names plus a feature or use case modifier can be more effective than targeting pure brand names. This allows you to craft your ad copy and landing page around a specific feature, and appear more relevant to searchers.

These campaigns can be tempting, but my typical recommendations are to invest cautiously here. Trying to sway a prospect’s decision when they’re already narrowing down their choices can be difficult for brand’s with longer buying cycles.

Wrapping Up

Competitor research can be helpful when looking for new ideas and market opportunities, but I recommend caution when actively trying to emulate competitors’ tactics or target their brand names on search.

Despite providing similar products/services, most businesses are unique and the internal processes your team uses might not support the same surface level tactics that you can observe competitors implementing.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.