Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 68 - Spy on your competitors
This is going to be such a great episode. We're talking about spying on your competitors, increasing Impression Share, and what might be the worst of all Google Ads tools: the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool.
You see, usually I answer three of your burning questions that you've asked me on social media. For today's episode, I took a look at the top queries in my Google Search Console for my website, and I picked out queries that have a lot of impressions and that I don't think I've actually answered properly before.
The SEO has spoken, and I'm here to deliver.
I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.
This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 68: Spy on Your Competitors.
The first thing I noticed when looking at my search console is there are a ton of queries in there for spying on your competitors. Things like “spy on competitors' keywords,” “how to check competitors' Google Ads,” “how to check competitors' ads on Google,” “Google Search Ads spy tool,” “how to steal keywords from your competitors,” “how to check where my competitors are using Google Ads.” Literally, there's hundreds of these.
So here's what you need to know about spying on your competitors in Google Ads.
First, no matter what the paid tools might tell you, the only definitive way to know what keywords your competitors have in their Google Ads accounts is to look in their Google Ads accounts. Everything else is a guess, an educated guess based on data, but a guess.
Second, just because you see your competitor's ad on a certain search, it doesn't mean they have that keyword. It could be that they're using Performance Max or Dynamic Search Ads or Broad Match keywords, or even Phrase Match keywords, and they're not regularly checking their Search Terms report, so they may have no idea what they're actually advertising on.
Okay, with those caveats in place, here are three of my favorite ways to spy on your competitors in a way that will be useful to you.
First, of course, is Keyword Planner. Discover new keywords, start with a website, enter your competitor's website, and now you can see the kind of keywords they're showing up for organically, which is a great starting point to understand their keywords. If your competitor offers a lot of different things, different products or services, then I recommend looking page by page rather than looking at their website as a whole.
Second is to look at your own auction insights, at the ad group level if you can. Your competitor's Search Impression Share versus your own can give you an idea of keyword overlap. For example, maybe in one ad group with keywords about one topic, they have 50% Impression Share on your keywords, but in another ad group with keywords to do with another topic, they have less than 10% Impression Share on those keywords. This can help you understand their strategy and priorities relative to yours.
Third is my favourite and most underutilized, the Google Ads Transparency Center, AKA the Google Ads Library. Type in your competitor's domain, look at their Search ads, and you will learn quickly what type of keywords are important to them.
Of course, the Google Ads Library is not just for Search ads. If you want to truly spy on your competitor's Google Ads, then you should be checking the Google Ads Library regularly. You can find out what kind of ads they're running, like Video, Display or Shopping. You can estimate their budget by seeing if they have hundreds of different ads or maybe just a few ad varieties. You can see what assets, what extensions they're using, if any, by looking at their ad copy.
You can even infer their targeting. For example, if your competitor is a skincare company and they're running image-based ads that all have to do with anti-aging, then boom, you know that's a focus for them versus maybe another that's really focused on their, I don't know, anti-acne properties.
And an extension of this, this doesn't work in the Google Ads library, but if you do see one of your competitor’s ads in the wild, like on YouTube or on the Discover feed, hit the three dots and then you'll be able to see the kind of targeting they're using. It won't tell you the exact targeting, but it'll tell you why you've been targeted. For example, your age or your household income range or your parental status, which could suggest they're using detailed demographics. Maybe you saw the ad because of Google's estimation of your interests or your areas of interest based on your activity. That suggests that they might be using affinity segments. Maybe you're seeing that ad because of your similarity to groups of people that advertisers are trying to reach. That could suggest they're using PMax or optimized targeting.
Again, this only works if you've actually been served the ad in the wild. So anytime you hit those three dots, spy on targeting, you can learn a lot.
To recap, the best ways to spy on your competitors in Google Ads are to use Keyword Planner, look at your auction insights, and leverage the Google Ads Transparency Center.
Of course in my signature membership program, Inside Google Ads, I show you how to do all of this step by step. Join now at learn.jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L dot C-A, or follow the link in the episode description.
The second thing I'm seeing a lot of in my Search Console Insights is “how to improve Impression Share in Google Ads” and related things like, “how to improve Search Impression Share,” “how to increase Search Impression Share,” “increase Impression Share Google Ads,” et cetera.
Now Episode 20 of this podcast from June 13th, 2024 is called, Does Impression Share matter in Google Ads? So we have spoken about this topic before, but that was almost a year ago and evidently, you all want to know more about improving or increasing your Impression Share.
First, remember, metrics are morally neutral. There is no good Impression Share or bad Impression Share, just what it is now and what you'd like it to be tomorrow.
Next, as a matter of personal preference, I don't like to have a campaign-level Impression Share of less than 10% because that suggests we have a misalignment going on. Not enough budget, too low ad rank, basically trying to do too much with too little.
But that doesn't mean that higher Impression Share is always better. I've been on Google Ads coaching calls before where the client has, say, 60% Impression Share on non-brand Search. And guess what? Their CPCs are through the roof. It is not profitable. Too high Impression Share could mean you're over-invested and you're actually less profitable than you would be with a lower Impression Share.
I don't want you to get the wrong takeaway here - 60% is not some magic number. It was just the number in one client example - but the takeaway is that we don't want to be over-invested with too high Impression Share, either.
So now that we understand there's no good or bad, there's no magic number, but you want to increase your Impression Share, how do you do that?
The key to increase your Impression Share is to match what you have to the opportunity. And there's really only four ways to do that.
First is budget. Spending more money can get you more Impression Share, to a point. There's only so many searches out there and you probably have competitors, so there are only so many impressions to go around, but budget is generally the simplest lever to increase Impression Share.
Next is bidding. This is one half of ad rank. Increasing your bids can allow you to win more auctions and get more impressions. If you are manually bidding, then this literally means increasing your bids. If you're on Target CPA, it means increasing your CPA target to increase bids. If you're on Target ROAS, it means decreasing your ROAS target to increase your bids. And if you're on a Maximize strategy, like maximize conversions, then increasing your budget will actually give the algorithm room to increase your bids.
Third is quality. This is the other half of ad rank. Improving your Quality Score can allow you to win more auctions and get more impressions without increasing your bids or your budget. In fact, the higher your quality, the less you have to spend on ads. I've never done a whole episode dedicated to Quality Score, but I do love this topic. There's an article on my blog called The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads Quality Score. I will drop a link to that in the episode description for you.
And then fourth is targeting. This is the one most people forget about because the first three suggestions I had to increase your Impression Share are about doing more. But the fourth way to increase Impression Share is to do less. Shrink the pie.
Target fewer locations or smaller locations like a city instead of a state.
Pause some ad groups
Pause some keywords
Switch from Broad to Phrase Match or Phrase to Exact Match
Make the opportunity size smaller. By keeping your budgets and bidding constant, but going after a smaller opportunity, your Impression Share will increase.
And that's how you can increase your Impression Share in Google Ads. Increase your budget, increase your bids, increase your quality, and or decrease your targeting.
Now, next week is Google Marketing Live, also known as GML. This is the annual event where Google announces all the big changes that will be coming to the platform over the next year. I'm thrilled to be attending GML in person this year at the Googleplex in Mountain View for a full day of panels, talks, and interviews with Google's product teams. And of course, I'll be reporting back to you on everything I find.
So three things you need to know about Jyll's GML coverage this year.
First, I'm hosting the fourth annual Google Marketing Live Tailgate on YouTube and LinkedIn with some fellow industry experts. Note that this is the unofficial tailgate. You can tune in to hear our predictions. That'll be 8 a.m. Pacific on May 21st, 2025, one hour before the official Google Marketing Live keynote begins.
Next, I will be rush producing and editing an Inside Google Ads podcast episode for you, which will come out on May 22nd, 2025 with my analysis and insights from GML, what you need to know going forward. It may come out a little later than usual that day because I will be hopping a red eye home, but keep an eye out for that episode next week.
And last but not least, I'm hosting a special one-hour Q&A with my Inside Google Ads course members also on May 22nd, 2025. We'll have a few guest experts there and we're going to share what you need to know about Google Ads in 2025.
If you're not yet a member, you can join Inside Google Ads at learn.jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L.ca, or follow the link in the episode description.
Our final query today is not the one with the most search volume, but it's so specific I had to take this opportunity to answer it. So here's the query that shows up with thousands of impressions in my Search Console. “The search location doesn't match this campaign's location targeting settings.”The implicit question here in this search is, what does that error mean?
My answer is just don't use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool. It was built for another time and is not helpful now. The way the tool is supposed to work is you enter a search term (actually, it's a query, but let's not get pedantic right now), a location, a language and a device, whether or not the user belongs to a given audience, and then Google will tell you if you're currently showing ads for that search term, and if not, why not?
It's often wrong or at least misleading, which is why I don't recommend using it, because there are so many reasons you might not be showing an ad. Most of them are not nefarious. And the most common one is the fact that search engine results are personalized, and this tool just can't account for that.
So anyway, if you see this error, “the search location doesn't match this campaign's location targeting settings,” it's because you've chosen a location that you're not actually targeting. So the reason your ad isn't showing is because you've chosen New York City, for example, when your campaign location targeting is only set to California. So you shouldn't be showing ads in New York City. There's nothing actually wrong here.
I hope you enjoyed our deep dive today into competitor spying, increasing Impression Share and ad preview woes. Remember if you've got a burning question you want me to answer on this podcast, drop a comment on any of my social media posts, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Threads, and Blue Sky. I check them all, and your question might just be featured in an upcoming episode.
Today's Insider Challenge is this. Let's say you've spied on your competitors using Keyword Planner and found a bunch of keyword ideas that are relevant to your business, but you aren't currently advertising on them. What do you do next?
The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real life Google Ads problem solving.
Last Episode's Challenge, Episode 67, was this. You manage Google Ads for a client who loves to dig their hands into the account. You have a change history script running so that you can be notified whenever they go in and make a change because it happens so frequently. They are an advocate of manual bidding all the way. How might you approach convincing them to test Smart Bidding?
If I had a client like this, real talk, I would fire them. But anyway.
How would I pitch Smart Bidding to someone who is a manual bidding devotee? I would want to show them a concrete example from a relevant account on how Smart Bidding can drive superior results when you allow it to do so.
For example, I've probably shared this before, but it is such a picture perfect textbook example of the benefits of switching from manual to Smart Bidding, I'll never stop sharing it. This is an example from a home services client.
On manual bidding, Search Campaigns, they had $1.77 CPCs and a 1.7% conversion rate. So their cost per lead was $121 and they got 6 leads per month, on average.
We switched to Smart Bidding and in the first two weeks alone, so including the learning period and everything, CPCs skyrocketed at $10 average CPCs versus CPCs under $2 previously. However, conversion rate also skyrocketed to a 15% conversion rate instead of less than 2% conversion rate previously. Because of course, the campaign is now aligned with my goals. It's trying to get conversions rather than trying to get cheap clicks. That means that our cost per lead dropped from $121 per lead to $68 per lead. And our lead volume increased. We used to get about 6 leads per month on average, and now on Smart Bidding, we got 24 leads in just two weeks.
We checked with the client and they said that the quality of the leads was better, too. So yes. CPCs skyrocketed. CPCs went up by more than five times. But on the metrics that mattered, lead volume, lead quality, and cost per lead, those all improved dramatically.
Now, will all transitions from manual bidding to Smart Bidding go this smoothly? No, this is a picture perfect story. But I would find a story like this to show that higher CPCs are not the enemy, poor quality traffic is. The goal is getting that higher conversion rate from higher quality traffic, more volume, more leads, more customers, better ROI.
Would you take a similar approach with this client or something different?
I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.