Tool availability
The Competitor monitoring is not included in the Standard package. The price depends on the number of jobs, locations and keywords you monitor. Contact support team to get started.
Overview
The Competitor Monitoring tool helps you track competitors in your Google Ads space by monitoring paid search results for specific keywords in a given location. By selecting a brand campaign and a location, this tool provides insights into competitor activities and offers automatic budget-saving features.
This article will guide you through how the tool works, setting up a monitoring job, accessing insights and reports, and using smart activation to save brand budget. We will cover:
How it works
Setup a new monitoring job
Insights & reports
Save brand budget with Smart activation
Infringement detector
How It Works
The Competitor Monitoring tool is designed to provide real-time insights into how your competitors are performing in Google Ads. Here's an overview of how the tool functions:
Keyword Monitoring: The tool tracks the top 5 keywords from your selected brand campaign. These keywords are used to perform searches on Google to see which advertisers appear in the paid search results.
Advertiser Tracking: The tool identifies and records all advertisers that appear in the paid search results for these keywords. It monitors their positions and frequency in the search results.
Data Visualization: The tool displays the data in two primary charts:
Pie Chart: Shows the percentage of search share each advertiser has at the top of the paid results.
Bar Chart: Displays how often each advertiser ranks in positions 1 to 4 in the paid search results.
Smart Activation: To save your brand's budget, the tool can automatically pause your brand campaign when no competitors are bidding on the monitored keywords. This ensures you only spend your budget when necessary.
Setup a New Monitoring Job
To start monitoring your competitors, follow these steps to set up a new job:
Step 1: Select the Brand Campaign
Choose Campaign: From your Google Ads account, select the brand campaign you want to monitor. This campaign's top 5 keywords will be used for competitor monitoring.
Step 2: Choose keywords
Select keywords: The tool will suggest the top 5 keywords based on click volume from the Brand campaign. However, we suggest you review the keywords and make sure all 5 are relevant to monitor, redundant keywords should be deselected for more relevant insights.
Example: If suggested to use "Adidas" and "Adidas stockholm", usually "Adidas stockholm" is redundant and "Adidas" is enough to get good insights.
Step 2: Choose a Location
Select Location: Choose one or more locations where you want the monitoring to occur. The suggestions listed is based on your Brand campaign location targeting.
Step 3: Configure Monitoring Frequency
Trial and Frequency: Decide if you want to start with a 14-day trial. Then, choose how often the tool should run the monitoring job:
Hourly: Select this option if you need frequent updates on competitor activity.
Daily: Choose this for a less frequent, but still regular, monitoring schedule.
Step 4: Start the Monitoring Job
Initiate Monitoring: Once you’ve configured the settings, start the monitoring job. The tool will begin tracking and recording competitor activities based on the selected parameters.
Insights & Reports
You can find all Competitor monitoring metrics explained in detailed here.
The Competitor Monitoring tool provides comprehensive insights and reports on competitor activities:
1. Pie Chart: Share of absolute top of search
Visualize Market Share: The pie chart displays the percentage of search share that each advertiser holds in the top paid search results for the monitored keywords. This gives you a clear picture of how dominant each competitor is in the market.
2. Bar Chart: Top competitors
Track Ranking Performance: The bar chart shows how often each advertiser ranks in positions 1 to 4 for the monitored keywords along with Share of search. This helps you understand which competitors are consistently appearing and how often your ads are appearing at the top.
Save Brand Budget with Smart Activation (optional)
The Competitor Monitoring tool includes a Smart Activation feature designed to optimize your budget usage.
Activate and pause Smart activation
You can choose to enable or disable Smart activation at any time, you can choose to activate and save brand budget or only use the tool for insights.
1. Automatic Campaign Pausing
Smart Activation: When the tool detects that no other advertisers are bidding on your monitored keywords, it can automatically pause your brand campaign. This prevents unnecessary ad spend when there’s no competition for those keywords.
2. Resume Campaign Automatically
Budget Efficiency: Once competitors start bidding on the keywords again, the tool will automatically reactivate your brand campaign. This ensures that your ads are only running when they need to, maximizing your budget efficiency.
3. Full transparency
How often is my Campaign paused: See how many times you ads where paused and activated, along with an estimation of how much budget was saved by pausing the campaign when no other advertiser where bidding.
Infringement detection
The Infringement Detector is a powerful tool designed to safeguard your brand's integrity by monitoring and detecting unauthorized use of your brand terms in Google search ads. Here’s how it works:
Automated Monitoring: The feature continuously scans Google search ads to identify instances where competitors are using your brand's terms within their ad copy. This kind of usage is typically prohibited by Google’s advertising policies unless prior permission has been granted, making it a potential infringement.
Infringement Alerts: When our system detects an ad from a competitor that improperly features your brand name or terms, it captures and displays the ad details. This gives you full visibility into who is violating your brand’s rights and how they are using your trademarked terms.
Streamlined Complaint Process: To make protecting your brand as efficient as possible, the feature provides a simple, integrated way to report the infringement. You can generate and send a formal complaint to Google directly from the platform, requesting that the ad be taken down for violating advertising guidelines.
By using our Infringement Detector, you can ensure that your brand name remains protected, your competitors adhere to fair advertising practices, and your brand image is not misused or exploited.
Conclusion
The Competitor Monitoring tool is an essential resource for keeping track of competitor activities in Google Ads and optimizing your brand’s campaign budget. By setting up monitoring jobs, analyzing the provided insights, and utilizing Smart Activation, you can maintain a competitive edge while ensuring efficient budget management. For further assistance or more detailed instructions, please refer to the tool’s help section or contact support.