Check on Your Competitor's Google Ads

If you want to crush it with your Google Ads, you need to know what your competitors are doing. Period.

Today, I’ll show you exactly how to see which keywords they bid on, how their ads stack up, and how you can use these insights to dominate—both in PPC and organic search.

To get started, just enter one of your competitors’ domains and click “Analyze.”

You’ll then see a list of their top paid keywords, like this:

For each keyword your competitor is running ads on, you’ll see the following metrics:

• Rank: This shows their ad’s position for each keyword, and whether they’ve gained or lost rankings
• Traffic %: This tells you what percentage of your competitor’s paid traffic comes from each keyword
• Volume: This is the total number of monthly searches for each keyword
• KD %: Keyword difficulty indicates how hard it would be to rank (organically) in the top 10 for each keyword
• CPC: Cost per click tells you how much advertisers need to pay per click on their ads for each keyword
• # of results: How many organic search results there are for each keyword
• Search trend: Indicates the popularity of each keyword over the past 12 months

Here’s what you should look out for when analyzing these metrics:

Rank

Keywords your competitors rank top or nearly top for are ones they likely have high quality ads and landing pages for.

In other words:

These are ads you should analyze to understand why they’re ranking top.

Check out their ad copy, examine their CTAs, and explore their landing pages to find out what they do so well.

You can then use these insights to improve your own ads for these keywords and others you plan to target.

Traffic Percentage

A lot of the time, the ads that drive a big chunk of traffic to your competitors’ sites are for branded terms. Like how one ad for “reebok” drives almost 36% of Reebok’s paid traffic:

But you might find relevant keywords driving a significant portion of traffic to your competitors that you’re not yet targeting.

These could be keyword variants you hadn’t considered. Or they could be for products you don’t yet offer but could in the future.

Volume

You’ll need some level of search volume for your ads to be worth running. If nobody is searching for your keywords in the first place, nobody will click on your ads for those keywords.

Don’t just go straight for the keywords with millions of searches per month. Balance this with other metrics like keyword difficulty and cost per click when forming your ad campaigns.

Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty is a measure of how hard it would be to rank organically in the top 10 search results for each keyword.

While this is obviously relevant for SEO campaigns, it’s also useful for PPC.

How so?

Because keyword difficulty takes into account the quality of the domains that rank organically for each keyword. If a lot of authoritative websites rank organically for a keyword, it suggests that keyword is valuable in some way (or they wouldn’t devote resources to ranking for it).

So, while not the only metric worth looking at, keyword difficulty can still provide some insight into the level of competition on the SERP.

But a metric like cost per click is typically a more useful competitive indicator from an advertising perspective.

CPC

The cost per click is an important metric to track because it tells you how much you’ll need to spend to get people to click on your ads.

But a high CPC will also usually indicate a high level of competition. Meaning you might struggle to rank your ads without very high-quality copy and landing pages.

A good beginner strategy is to look for keywords that have low CPCs (but still decent search volume) and, ideally, stay away from those with very high costs per click. These can quickly drain your budget if you don’t have high-converting copy to back it up.

Search Trend

Finally, the search trend can tell you a lot about the seasonality or popularity for a given search term.

A keyword might look super promising to target, but if it looks to be on a downward trend for the rest of the year, it might not be worth devoting resources to right now.

Why Spy on Your Competitors’ Ads?

You can learn a lot from your competitors’ ads, whether you’re running your own PPC campaign or even if your focus is on SEO.

Here’s how:

For PPC:

By checking your competitors’ Google Ads, you can see which keywords drive traffic and results for their business.

You can also assess their ad copy and landing pages, using the insights to improve the performance of your own ads.

This works in the opposite direction too. Imagine you see your competitors are spending a significant portion of their budget on keywords that are dropping in popularity or that have a very high CPC.

You can then avoid wasting your own ad budget on those keywords, and focus on more relevant or evergreen keywords.

Or perhaps you check out their landing pages and determine they’re pretty poor quality. You can then create better copy and (hopefully) outrank and outconvert them—boosting your ROI in the process.

For SEO:

Competitor ads show you proven keyword opportunities. If they pay for those clicks, the terms likely convert.

You can then use those keywords to inform your SEO content strategy and drive more organic traffic—no guesswork required.

Tools to Use to Check Your Competitors’ Google Ads

Google Keyword Planner

Use Google’s free Keyword Planner to get insights into search volumes, competition metrics, and bid costs for the terms your competitors are targeting.

Because this data comes directly from Google, you can be sure it’s reliable.

Semrush

Use Semrush’s Advertising Research tool to see your competitors’ top paid keywords, ad samples, and landing pages.

It’ll also show you the keywords each ad ranks for.

Google Ads Transparency Center

The Google Ads Transparency Center shows you the actual ads your competitors have run through Google.

You can see advertiser details, recent ads, and even filter by region and format to get a clearer picture of their current campaigns in your specific market.

SpyFu or iSpionage

SpyFu has been collecting ad data since 2006. You can leverage this historical database to get a clear picture of your competitors’ advertising activity.

You’ll be able to get a clear overview of their campaign spend. You’ll see how many keywords they rank for, the clicks they get from their ads, and how much they’re likely spending each month.

And you can get granular data about the keywords they rank for, including metrics like search volume, CPC, and the copy for each ad.

4 Steps to See Your Competitors’ Google Ads

Step 1: Identify Your Competitors

Search your target keywords and check who’s running ads. This is the most straightforward way to find out who your PPC rivals are.

But a more robust method is to type your domain into Semrush’s Advertising Research to reveal more of your top paid competitors (in the “Competitors” tab).

You’ll also see measures of how close a rival they are (“Com. Level”) and the number of paid keywords you have in common.

Step 2: Use Semrush to Find Their PPC Keywords and Ads

In the same Advertising Research tool, the “Position Changes” tab shows you all their paid keywords, CPCs, and live ads.

Go through the relevant keywords and check the ad copy to understand the messaging they use.

Step 3: Check Their Landing Pages

The ad copy is just one piece of the Google Ads puzzle. Your landing pages also affect how Google ranks your ads AND it affects your conversion rates too.

So, head to Google and click your competitors’ ads to check out their landing pages. (You can also check out the landing page directly from Semrush by clicking the link in the “URL” column.)

Look at their headlines, CTAs, and trust elements. Use these notes to improve your own landing pages.

Step 4: Organize Your Data

Keep a spreadsheet of relevant keywords, ad copy, CPC data, and landing page notes that you can learn from. Highlight which terms work for PPC and which might be great targets for SEO content instead.

If you’re using a tool like Semrush, you can select the keywords you want to keep track of and export them directly from the list.

Then, rinse and repeat this for all of your top rivals. Use the insights you gain from checking their Google Ads to improve your own ad copy, landing pages, and conversion rates.