TLDR: Most PPC teams treat competitor research as a once-a-quarter action. That misses most of their perfromance like where competitors actually spend, the keywords they’re bidding on that you can’t see in Google Ads, and how your account compares against the category average, all of it can sharpen your own decisions.
Understanding where your competitors are spending on PPC
Most teams start identify their competitors based on selling similar or the same products, which at a macro level is correct. But when you dig into digital marketing the view becomes less clear.
Start with your Impression Share report in Google Ads. It shows you exactly who else is appearing in the same auctions as you. Keyword overlap creates competition even between brands you wouldn’t naturally think of as rivals.
From there, go through these three tools. The Google Ads Transparency Center and Meta Ads Library of the brand show what ads a competitor currently has live, with a TikTok equivalent covering that platform too. Similarweb and Google Trends add the volume context: impression trends and how customer demand is actually moving, rather than just a snapshot of who’s active right now.
Using competitor keyword gaps to find untapped demand
Auction Insights will confirm whether a competitor is appearing in the same spaces you are. What it won’t show you is the rest of their keyword list, the terms you’re not bidding on at all. That requires a third-party tool. Ahrefs, for example, has a paid tier that surfaces the performance keywords a competitor is bidding on. There is no way round using an external tool here; Google Ads simply doesn’t expose it.
Bidding on a competitor’s exact terms, close variants, or avoiding them altogether comes down to budget and margin. If your margins are stronger than theirs, you can afford to pay more per customer and outlast them. If your margins are weaker, they can afford to go lower and win the auction. It’s a straightforward race to the bottom, and margin decides who can stay in it longer.
Product parity matters too. A retailer selling the exact same product as a competitor is fighting a much more direct battle than a D2C brand selling something comparable but not identical. That’swhere brand awareness and product education earn their place, giving customers a reason to choose you even when a like-for-like keyword search puts you both in front of them.
The fix: use a third-party tool to surface the keywords Auction Insights can’t show you, then let margin decide which of those gaps are actually worth bidding into.
Timing your budget against competitor activity cycles
Whether to pull spend back after a peak like Black Friday or summer and hold it in reserve for quieter months, or simply follow the seasonality calendar, depends entirely on where you sit against demand.
If you’re already maxing out demand in Google Ads, spending more in lower-funnel channels out of season won’t bring in additional customers. Lower-funnel activity captures existing demand; it doesn’t create new demand. Spending more there when you’ve already captured what’s available is just spend for the sake of it. The alternative is demand generation activity, deliberately building awareness out of season so there’s more demand to capture later. That’s a legitimate strategy, but a different one to simply reallocating budget.
Most brands still follow the seasonality calendar for good reason: demand genuinely is higher around peaks like Black Friday, and higher demand generally means cheaper customer acquisition. The trade-off is margin. Customers acquired during a sale period usually convert at a lower margin, so that has to be built into the maths before calling a high-volume, low-margin peak a win.
The fix: work out whether you’re demand-constrained or budget-constrained before shifting spend. Only move budget out of season if it’s funding genuine demand generation, not chasing lower-funnel clicks that were never there to capture.
Learning from competitor creative and Ad messaging
Your brand identity and tone of voice should always be your own. But that doesn’t mean ignoring what competitors are doing creatively, especially brands operating in a similar category with a similar audience.
The Meta Ads Library, Google Ads Transparency Center, and TikTok Ads Library all show which ads a competitor is currently running, and for how long. Ads that stay live for a long time are the ones more likely to be performing better. Ads that get pulled quickly are more likely to be underperforming for the brand. That pattern tells you what messaging is resonating in your category, without needing access to anyone’s actual performance data.
The line to hold is between learning and copying. Use what you see to refine your own proposition, lean into ideas that are clearly working, avoid the ones that visibly aren’t, but merge anything you take with your own brand identity. Lift messaging wholesale and it won’t sit well with your existing customers, and it does nothing to stop a shopper from simply buying from the brand you copied it from instead.
The fix: review competitor ad libraries regularly and treat longevity as your performance signal. Take the pattern, not the copy.
Benchmarking your PPC performance against category averages
Knowing your own account performance only tells you half the story. The other half is knowing how that performance compares to the category you’re competing in, not just the two or three brands you watch closely, but the wider average.
Similarweb, IMRG, and Google Trends are the tools you should lean on most for this. That’s not an exhaustive list, there’s plenty more competitive intelligence software out there, but between the three you get a genuinely insightful, well-rounded view of traffic, industry benchmarks, and demand trends without needing to build that picture from scratch.
The catch is that most of these tools solve one part of the problem each, which means running several subscriptions side by side just to get a full competitor view. That’s exactly the gap ASK BOSCO® is built to close. Instead of switching between multiple platforms to piece together where you stand, ASK BOSCO® connects your own performance data and benchmarks it against category averages in one place, so you can see how your account stacks up without paying for, or logging into, half a dozen separate tools.
The fix: use Similarweb, IMRG, and Google Trends as your starting point for category benchmarking, and look at where a platform like ASK BOSCO® can bring that view together with your own performance data in one place.
Turning competitor data into better PPC decisions
None of this works as a one-off exercise. The brands getting real value from competitor data are checking Impression Share regularly, revisiting keyword gaps as they open up, watching ad libraries for what’s staying live, and keeping an eye on the category average, not just their own dashboard.
If you want a clearer, more connected view of how your paid search performance compares to the market, get in touch with the Modo25 team to talk through your competitor benchmarking setup.
