Before launching advertising campaigns in Yandex.Direct, you need to analyze your competitors. Niche research will help you understand what the approximate advertising costs will be, how you need to improve your ads and website to achieve maximum conversion. If you ignore this stage of work, then most likely more than half advertising budget will merge into nowhere, and oh quick payback investments in advertising can only be dreamed of.
A competent and comprehensive analysis of competitors will allow you to determine:
- keywords for which it is better to advertise;
- typical mistakes when creating ads;
- approximate advertising costs;
- approximate number of impressions;
- directions for improving the site.
You can spend one day or a whole week analyzing competitors. The quality and completeness of the study will depend on the time spent. Let's take a closer look at the areas in which we will have to work.
First you need to get to know your competitors by sight. The easiest way is to use the section tools. Log in to the service, click on the desired tab and set the settings advertising campaign. Please select the display region applicable to your business. For example, if you provide services or sell goods only in Moscow and the region, indicate only these regions in the settings.
In the “Select Key Phrases” section, indicate words and phrases that are suitable for advertising your business. Use the built-in word search feature if keywords have not yet been identified.
Select the appropriate key phrases, add them to the list and click on the “Calculate” button.
The service will generate a table with a forecast of impressions and clicks, approximate costs for each keyword.
To see a list of competitors and their ads, check the box next to the keyword you are interested in and click on it. Study the information in the results window that opens.
According to our request - “infrared heater price” - at least 50 sites are advertised in Direct. Most of them show ads to users from Moscow and the region. The list also includes companies that sell equipment not only in the capital and region, but also in other regions of the country - for example, in Krasnodar, Vladivostok, Voronezh.
Most likely, these companies have not only retail outlets selling heaters, but also an online store. To check this information, click on the request link - a competitor’s website will open in a new tab, which you can study in more detail.
To avoid wasting a lot of time analyzing competitors and studying their landing sites, put yourself in the shoes of a potential buyer and select the most successful creatives from the list. Most likely, the list will include no more than 5-10 sites that you will have to compete with.
How to find out your competitors' keywords
Just find competitors before launching contextual advertising not enough. It is important to understand what keywords they are advertising for. Thanks to this analysis, you will find out the approximate costs of advertising and determine the most profitable phrases - those that will give more clicks.
You can superficially analyze keywords using the same Yandex.Direct “Budget Forecast” tool. The service will show how much you will have to spend on advertising for key phrases of interest, predict the approximate number of impressions and clicks, the average bid and other useful information.
Remember that when calculating the budget, the service focuses on those sites that have already launched contextual advertising. The numbers in the Budget Forecast report and on the advertising campaign page will be slightly different. The Budget Forecast report shows average data for ads in the selected region, and the campaign shows indicators for specific ad groups in this moment for the most expensive regions.
Services for analyzing competitors in Yandex.Direct
To get more accurate information, you will have to use third-party services to analyze keywords.
Serpstat
Using the Serpstat service, you can find all competitors who are advertised for the key query you are interested in. To do this you need to go to the website and enter the query in the search bar.
Next to it, indicate the search engine and the region where your ads will be displayed, and click on the “Search” button. The service will generate a detailed report - it will show the frequency of the phrase in Direct for the last month, the average cost of a click, variations of the key phrase for which sites from the top 50 Yandex place ads in Direct.
The service will not only provide statistics on key phrases, but also show competitors in search results, as well as in context.
In addition, Serpstat will show examples of ads that competitors use in their advertising campaigns.
To use Serpstat tools for competitor and keyword analysis, you do not need to buy a paid subscription.
Spywords
The SpyWords service will also help you analyze your competitors’ key phrases and get acquainted with examples of their ads. To do this you need to go to the website , enter a key phrase in the search bar and click on the “Track” button. When you enter a query, the service provides hints with similar phrases.
SpyWords will show the number of advertisers who use a given key phrase, the average cost per click, the number of impressions in Yandex and Google. In addition, the service will demonstrate examples of ads indicating the text, link to the landing page and the number of requests.
With SpyWords you can identify similar queries. The service will show them in a separate list.
Most SpyWords features are available in free mode. To use the extended package of tools, you will have to buy a paid subscription. Cost - from 1950 to 4950 rubles per month.
Advse
The Advse service will help you find competitors and determine the key phrases for which they advertise. To do this you need to go to the website and enter the phrases of interest into the window.
The service will generate a list of ten competing sites, sorting them by impression share.
To find out the keywords for which competitors are advertising, you will have to register on the site and buy a paid subscription - 1500 rubles per year, - V personal account specify the domain of your website and run the analysis. In 10–20 minutes, the service will generate a list of competitors, after which you can see what queries they are advertising for.
As already shown in the screenshots above, almost all services allow you to view competitors’ ads. Moreover, to analyze promotional materials, it is not necessary to purchase a paid subscription. If these tools are not enough, you can view competitors' advertisements in Yandex manually.
Enter the query you are interested in in the Yandex search bar and check out the advertising results.
Based on the results, you can determine which keywords should be used in your ads, which extensions - phone numbers and store opening hours, quick links, etc. - will help you overtake your competitors.
Be sure to use the advanced search capabilities. Set the correct region for display, determine the time interval, and indicate the accuracy of words in the query.
Yandex will show all paid advertisements in the specified region.
By studying your competitors' promotional materials, you can understand what principles to use to build your creatives and what points you need to include in your ads in order to be placed as high as possible in the search results.
Ideally, before launching an advertising campaign, you need to analyze not only competitors’ websites, ads and key queries for which they are shown in searches, but also find out the approximate advertising costs. It is quite possible to do this. The main thing is to create a list of key phrases, arm yourself with a calculator and use the tools of online services.
You will have to analyze each key phrase for which ads will be displayed, and then summarize the indicators of phrases from the list. The calculation is carried out according to the formula:
Budget = cost per click * number of requests * position CTR
Let’s use the Serpstat service described above and collect the main key queries of competitors in Direct.
Let’s say that the site is planned to be promoted for the request “buy an infrared heater.” We have two values from the formula - the number of requests and the cost per click. All that remains is to find out the CTR of the position.
The service blog provides approximate CTR values for positions.
You can use this data as a starting point when calculating your competitors’ budgets. All that remains is to multiply the numbers in the report. For the key phrase “buy an infrared heater” you will have to spend at least 5,057 rubles to be in the first position: 90.6 (cost per click) * 1595 (number of requests) * 0.035 (CTR position). The numbers will be approximate, since Serpstat calculates the cost of a click in dollars, and the data in the system is updated only once a month.
You can also find out the approximate budget of your competitors using the Direct “Budget Forecast” tool. Enter the keywords of interest into the window and click on the “Calculate” button. Don't forget to set the display region, otherwise the data will be inaccurate.
When analyzing the data in the report, pay attention to the “Traffic Volume” and “Budget Forecast” columns.
Remember VCG auction rules in Direct. To be in the first position among advertisements for the request “buy an infrared heater,” you will have to pledge at least 95,557 rubles to outbid the bid of your nearest competitor. To place on the second and third lines you need to allocate about 77,000 and 62,000 rubles, respectively. There will be less traffic, but you can compensate for positions with attractive ad text. To do this, you will have to turn again to the search results for the query of interest in specified region, analyze creative texts and landing pages, find possible mistakes made by competitors and prevent them when creating your own promotional materials.
Try analyzing your competitors in Direct today and make changes to existing advertising campaigns. Evaluate the results of the performance of impressions with the previous period and make sure that the main thing in context is good preparation.
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The active development of marketing entails the emergence of new abbreviations. Most often they come to us from the west and are difficult to decipher. PPC is one of them, which has already become familiar to many webmasters and Internet advertising specialists. Three letters encode three words – Pay per Click, which means “pay per click”. Literally, this means that the advertiser pays a search engine or any other engine for a specific person who clicked on the ad and went to the website.
In the past, pay-per-impression was common. More precisely, for 1000 impressions. But over time, the development of tools, as well as changes in human behavioral patterns on the Internet, new approaches have emerged. Among them is PPC. It seemed, and still seems to many, the most objective. After all, just because a person saw an advertisement does not mean that he was interested or remembered it. Pay for what? And if he clicked and went to the advertiser’s website, we can assume that you have “met.”
It is often said that PPC is contextual advertising. It is not correct. Contextual advertising can work according to the PPC model or any other, for example, CPA (cost per action) or CPM (T) (payment per 1000 impressions).
Where is PPC used?
In advertising, PPC is a pay-per-click model. Since clicks only occur in online advertising, this model is mainly used in online marketing. Advertisements can be placed anywhere: in search engines, social or teaser networks, on websites and in affiliate networks, suggesting such pricing. Most often used to drive traffic to a website.
For what? To turn an interested visitor into a buyer. A person who clicked on an advertisement is much closer to the moment of making a purchase than someone who simply saw it without taking any action.
It is very easy to imagine what online advertising is, because it surrounds us as soon as we go online. While moving through the pages of websites, spending time on social networks, watching videos, we are surrounded by advertising. All of it is placed by advertisers through special systems, and is paid according to the chosen model. If the PPC payment model is selected, then the advertisement can be shown many times, but the advertiser is charged only when the user clicks on it and goes to the site.
CPC and PPC - what's the difference?
As you already know, PPC is a pricing model, and CPC is the direct price that an advertiser pays for each specific click. It can be fixed or flexible. Flexible pricing is typical for social networks and search engines. The final cost of a click in them always depends on the competition in a certain period of time, precisely when the user makes a click. It is also affected by the quality score advertisement and the site to which it leads the user. Each system has its own quality assessment criteria, so they must be approached individually.
But a pay-per-click model cannot be considered effective based on CPC alone. Of course, the lower the cost per click, the better, but the benchmark is always ROI. This is another abbreviation, without understanding and taking into account which you should not try to analyze the effectiveness of Internet marketing. It stands for return on investment, which in Russian means return on investment. We will not go into details of the analysis of this indicator, but you should understand that the goal of any PPC campaign is to reduce CPC as much as possible, get targeted traffic, high conversion and high ROI.
What does a PPC specialist do?
PPC specialist – manages advertising campaigns. In fact, there is no person with such a narrow specialty. Often this is a contextual advertising specialist whose responsibilities include managing advertising campaigns on different platforms using different models pricing in order to obtain best result. To do this he:
- understands various advertising tools;
- communicates closely with the sales department and together with them determines priority product categories for sale on the Internet;
- creates advertising campaigns, customizes them depending on the specifics of the system.
- monitors campaigns, analyzes and constantly works to improve their effectiveness.
A PPC specialist can be a full-time specialist if the company is large and intends to sell large quantity goods or freelance.
Hello, dear readers of the blog site. Website promotion consists of analytics and active actions (purchasing links, internal optimization, content creation, etc.). The second without the first is money down the drain. There are a lot of services that provide data for SEO analytics, but it’s easy to get confused, and the quality of services and functionality are different for everyone.
At the same time, a meticulous, seasoned SEO specialist, who needs both a set of tools for promotion and a deep analysis of its effectiveness at once, rarely manages to find something worthwhile. In my opinion, SE Ranking is just the service that deserves the attention of professionals. I have never seen more detailed statistics on positions and more diverse functionality.
“Positions” module, or checking positions based on requests
SE Ranking suggests creating a project in the “Projects” section. Here you need to indicate the name, website address, depth of collection of positions, frequency of reports, etc. Next, in the “Positions” section, you need to select the created project and add queries for analysis and tracking.
It’s convenient that within one project you can different countries and cities. Until recently, it was possible to check them in the search engines Google, Yandex, Yandex Mobile, Yahoo, and Bing. Now we have added more positions in Youtube, Google Maps and Google Mobile. In the near future, as the support said, Amazon will also be connected.
Landing page. During the project creation process, the optimizer provides a list of queries that need to be monitored. The SE Ranking service does not recommend setting specific URLs for them. It automatically determines which pages rank for which queries. If the target page in the search results changes, the system notifies you about it.
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If you need to set a specific URL, you can do this at any time by changing the project settings.
Or simply click on the desired request to designate the landing page.
Within a project, requests are easily grouped into separate folders. For example, you can define groups by frequency - HF, MF and LF, by topics and any other criteria.
Statistics are presented in the form of tables with customizable columns and in the form of graphs that clearly show the average query position, traffic forecast, site visibility and the percentage of queries in the TOP 10. You can filter statistics by time intervals. You can also add up to five competing projects in order to analyze their positions in real time for the same keywords, search engines and regions in which your site is tracked.
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Other useful options within the tool:
- Ability to compare data on two dates;
- Viewing the dynamics of the average position;
- Traffic forecast by requests;
- Visibility of queries in search engines;
- Comparison of query positions in search engines.
SEO/PPC Competitor Analysis
SEO/PPC competitor analysis is a tool that allows you to monitor your competitors’ positions in organic search and contextual advertising.
Detailed statistics are available on the requests of organic competitors with the dynamics of their growth/decline in search results. Simply enter a competitor's address or keyword to collect data on existing competitors.
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In the paid search analysis section, you can view what ads your competitors place in contextual advertising, how many there are for each key request, and what positions they occupy. The system also contains an archive of previous contextual advertising campaigns.
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This toolkit can be used not only to search and analyze competitors, but also to select semantics. In the “Keyword Analysis – Similar Keywords” section, you can view data on similar queries, including frequency, number of sites in search results, competition, etc. SE Ranking contains the largest database of keywords in the CIS. For those who are moving “west” there are large bases for analyzing competitors in France, Italy, Canada, Spain, the USA, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Denmark.
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The service will create a comprehensive error report and conduct a detailed SEO audit of the page with accurate data. To do this, you need to specify the URL of the page and the keyword for which it is targeted.
A list of recommendations is attached to the analyzed page, which is based on the current requirements of search engines. SE Ranking specialists monitor changes in PS algorithms and constantly add new or remove irrelevant items from the audit.
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The report can be exported to PDF, sent by e-mail, or provided to the client as its own audit.
The report contains information about the SEO indicators of the page, referring backlinks and outgoing links, page loading speed and other technical nuances.
Information about the popularity of the page and the site as a whole in social networks is displayed.
Comprehensive and versatile from SE Ranking will tell you what and how to change on it in order to improve its ranking. The service also allows you to analyze the entire site. This knowledge can be used for its further development.
Keyword clustering
The system is fully automated. It distributes keywords into clusters based on an analysis of the TOP 10 search engines. Using this tool, you can quickly distribute keywords throughout the site, avoid cannibalization, and determine which queries are best placed on the main page and which on internal pages.
There are a lot of settings for meticulous SEO optimizers, for example, clustering accuracy, region, language, a list of sites from the TOP 10 upon request, frequency checking (exact, phrase and frequency matching), a list of highlighted words on search engine results pages for a given list of keywords.
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Web monitor
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To start monitoring, you need to add a list of pages that require tracking. The system monitors changes in content, meta tags, incoming and outgoing links, indexing in Yandex and Google and other parameters.
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Using flexible settings, you can set periodic scanning (once a day/week/month, on certain days) or start it at any time.
Backlink analysis
Using this tool you can find out:
- What backlinks do you or your competitor have?
- Types of links and the volume of its link mass;
- Information about the semantics of promotion (for what queries the rival site is promoted, what anchors it uses);
You can check the parameters of backlinks and the pages on which they are located. You can find out the following information:
- TCI of the page and the site as a whole;
- anchor list of backlinks;
- indexing status in Google and Yandex;
- link status (found or not, server response code, closed in nofollow/noindex, in robots.txt);
- rating of the donor site according to Moz, Alexa.
Backlink monitoring
You can track on a graph how the number of links changes, view the cloud of anchors, and evaluate which donors use which anchors. You will see how the link mass is growing, what is the age of the backlinks.
SEO potential
Using this module you can estimate the cost of attracting traffic from Google Adwords, the amount of potential traffic from organic search results, the predicted amount. To find out the number of leads, you need to set the conversion from visitors to clients and the cost of each target action.
The module allows you to evaluate:
- potential traffic to the site;
- its cost if contextual advertising in Google Adwords were used for promotion;
- potential number of leads.
The tool will help you determine:
- what is the maximum number of people you can bring from organic search results;
- It’s much more profitable to invest in SEO or contextual advertising from Google Adwords.
The tool is located in the “Analytics and Traffic” section. Select a project, go there and select the “SEO Potential” tab.
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conclusions
SE Ranking is a powerful toolkit wrapped in an intuitively simple interface. With it you can easily analyze the site by a huge number parameters and generate a professional report for the client for promotion, you will be able to adequately and accurately monitor the effectiveness of SEO strategies, correct site errors, and so on.
SE Ranking is easy to learn and is suitable even for a novice optimizer. Although the pros will not remain indifferent to it, since the service saves time. In addition, significant updates are released every 1-2 months: country databases for competitor analysis, new tools (such as a lead generator), filters for external links. So it becomes even easier to manage projects of any complexity.
Good luck to you! Before see you soon on the pages of the blog site
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How to avoid common mistakes when promoting a website
Why do you need competitor analysis in Yandex Direct, as well as in other traffic sources? Firstly, to study the market, and secondly, to find out how competitors are promoting a product or service, and on this basis create your own unique value proposition, interesting target audience and increasing sales conversion.
There is a separate article on how to use tools and services for teaser and social networks, now let’s talk about contextual advertising.
Competitors in Direct.
If you have found an exclusive product to promote, this does not mean that there will be no competition in its advertising. In any niche, to solve certain problems and meet the needs of the audience, there will always be options for proposals that differ in effectiveness and methods of execution.
For example, if you are advertising an innovative product that effortlessly burns excess fat, you will still have to fight your way among competitors in contextual advertising with their offers - from weight loss belts to teas and fitness centers.
Demand.
Before analyzing how your rivals “breathe”, you first need to find out - if the topic is dead and no one is interested in it, you shouldn’t deal with it. This is done through wordstat.yandex.ru or trends.google.ru, about which there are entries on the website.
We determine what the target audience is - how they formulate queries in the search bar, and compile a list of them.
Ads of competitors in Direct upon request.
Click “Show all” - we will see a list of all competitors’ advertisements and their number for this request
We look at what USPs are used and what values are emphasized to attract attention potential buyers- this will give you the opportunity not to repeat yourself and create your own special offer. TO In addition, we will find out how many competitors’ ads in Direct are promoted based on the datakeywords.
Automation of analysis of contextual advertising of competitors.
For faster and more efficient work, the service is used. We set up the Yandex or Google search system we are interested in, enter keyword and a tab with statistics opens:
- the top line indicates the total number of variations of queries from the searched one;
- on the left side are phrases embedded in the keyword indicating their frequency and the cost of a click for each in Yandex Direct (Google Adwords) at the current time;
- on the right - only those attachments that are currently used in contextual advertising.
If you click “Show all” under the left side, a list of query variations will be presented - depending on the tariff, full or limited. The same actions on the right side will provide more complete information for analyzing competitors’ advertising campaigns.
In the new tab we are shown ads promoting by specified request. We look at what USP our competitors have, what mistakes they made from a marketing point of view, and what interesting things we can take into account
If you click “Ads” in the left sidebar menu, we will, among other things, be shown all the keywords of competitors in Yandex Direct for each of them, as well as display positions and cost per click
Summarize.
What does using Wordstat and Serpstat give:
- You will understand how in demand your offer is;
- based on query analysis, you will find directions for collecting keywords;
- find out the level of competition;
- check what keywords are used to promote competitors who offer solutions to the same problems of the target audience as your offer;
- identify the weak and strong points in the USP of your competitors’ ads;
- create your own unique value proposition for potential clients that is not repeated by others.
The opinions of ppc specialists on this matter are divided into two camps. Some believe that it is impossible to do without analyzing competitors, others say that it is a waste of time. Who is right?
Where to look when analyzing competitor advertising
- see the number and quality of queries in the topic;
- see the number of advertisements in the topic;
- evaluate the quality of compiled headlines and texts;
- study the semantics, what and how many keywords are in one ad;
- see if there are ad extensions;
- study the landing pages to which advertisements lead.
They can be done manually, but some are very difficult without the help of third-party services. Now let’s go through each one and figure out: how to do it, what it gives us, and what will happen if we don’t do it.
Number of queries in the topic
To do this, we will need assistant services, since it is simply impossible to obtain this information in any other way. Among such services is the multifunctional Serpstat platform.
Take a key phrase that characterizes your niche, enter it into the service and read the summary report.
For example, I'm opening an online store jewelry and I want to know the competition for gold rings. It is this phrase, “Golden Ring,” that I enter into Serpstat and look at the number of key phrases in the context.
Don't forget to select your search engine region.
What does this give?
Quantity and quality of ads in the topic
Again, we will not manually track the number of competitor ads, since search engines They do not provide data on the number of competitors’ ads, nor on the key phrases for which ads are displayed.
Serpstat collects all ads that contain a key phrase in the text and that are currently visible in YAN or Display Network.
What does this give?
Goal: identify strengths and weak sides advertisements of each competitor, analyzing the texts and highlighting trigger words that can attract buyers.
Without looking at this report, we won't know how strong or weak our opponents are in context. We won’t see their key features that they use to attract visitors to the site.
To clearly show the importance of analyzing ads and finding their weaknesses, let's analyze the first one in the report.
Heading
“Gold bracelets at super prices - From 1600 r/g”
Text
“Looking for a gold ring? Come in and check out our prices!”
Do you think the ad text is correct? Nothing would confuse you in such an advertisement, where it is not clear what product they are offering me: either a ring or a bracelet.
Semantics
What does it mean?
For this number of keywords, the same ad is displayed; in our case, there is one text for 672 keywords. And this also speaks about the quality of work of the ppc specialists who are leading the project.
But can the services be trusted? Take any keyword from the list for which the ad is set and check it manually in Yandex.
Another feature of the services: they show the history of the last scan and do not collect data on paid search results 24/7.
Why is it good?
Yandex and Google have a schedule for displaying ads and distribution of impressions depending on the budget. They are not always available in search results. Also, ads can be changed or deleted, but they remain in the services until the next scan.
If we don’t study this, we won’t see our opponents’ weak point and won’t be able to take advantage of it.
Landing pages
If you work in Serpstat or Semrush, then simply click on the ad title and you will find yourself on the landing page.
Or click on the ad in the search engine. Go through a dozen different ads in the same topic and see the quality of the landing pages where visitors land.
What does this give?
You will receive information about the relevance of the landing page to the ad, the advantages and disadvantages of other people's sites compared to yours, which affects lead generation.
If a person clicks on a competitor and lands on a page that is not relevant to the search query, do not repeat this mistake and you will reduce your bounce rate.
Ad extensions
How to watch? Hands in search results. Enter several queries related to the topic of your products and see if your competitors’ ads have extensions. Evaluate how well they are selected and whether they exist at all.
What does this give?
Ad extensions are additional opportunity attract the customer's attention and force him to visit your store.
Good increases in CTR and conversions: phone numbers, location, additional links and clarifications.
What else do we pay attention to?
Important factors when analyzing the competitive context also include:
- ad display time;
- is there remarketing;
- Are they advertised on all devices: mobile, desktop;
- Is there targeting based on the interests of the target audience?
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