How to analyze your competitors Google ad spending with free tools

I wanted to find out direct competitors ad spending, and do it fast and cheap

My mantra always is: “I don't have to invent bicycle once again!”, therefore when I have some task to do, I just browse internet or other available sources and see what is the latest and greatest out there.

What I wanted to understand regarding competition:

Obtain a list of competitors (sufficient amount so I can make data-based analysis and therefore conclusions)
What channels they are using to promote their products and services (like social media; LinkedIn; Google search etc.)
What keywords they are using in their ads/campaigns and other promotions
How much they are paying for Google ads (starting with click through rate (CTR); most expensive keywords etc.) and what is their average budget for marketing campaigns and how much money they are spending on ads per month
Average split between organic search vs paid search in the CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) industry

Step 1 - Get the list of companies to analyze

First, I obtained the list of the companies that operates in the industry, in our case those are CRO focused companies. Great source to find competitors is Clutch.co , which is sort of a database of different industry companies and experts.

In this website I obtained list of all CRO companies available there - in my case close to 3000, which is rather good number for analysis. Website provides tons of useful information and users can simply sort and filter companies, based on their focus areas, size, budget, location and much more. I was especially interested in filtering out companies that is mainly focusing in CRO service.

Side note - clutch.co site is focusing on industries like, advertising & marketing, web and software development, IT services and solution and mobile app development.

Step 2 - Find free online tools, for the analysis

As always, I started with browsing online, if you are facing similar task I definitely recommend this article How to spy on your Google ads competitors. In the article author gives an insight of what sort of information can be found online (about the competitors) and list of free and paid tools available. To be honest, this was the article I was looking for. It saved tons of my valuable time. I got the high-level overview about available tools, and what information I could extract from each of the tool. And I was lucky as combination of two tools (Similarweb.com and SpyFu.com), allowed me to get the answers I needed.

Step 3 – Analyze competitors

I understood that, even though I have list of 3000 competitors, it will take too much time to manually analyze them. So, I narrowed down competitor list (I chose only companies, that is profiling in CRO 80% - 100% of their portfolio).

I started to analyze competitors in these free tools: Similarweb and SpyFu

Similarweb

Site works great for large companies in the industry. From this tool it is possible to collect information such as overall traffic to the webpage (including split per countries); traffic sources (split between direct, referrals, search, social, mail, display) and even deeper analysis of traffic sources one by one, for example, search split paid vs organic or referral sources etc.

Example of paid VS organic traffic split for a competitor

SpyFu

Site’s advantage is that its database contains a lot of information about almost every company I was interested in. From this tool it is possible to collect information for each specific site, such as - traffic information from Google (paid vs organic); paid per search (PPC), including paid keywords and estimated monthly ads budget; competition; competitor shared keywords; paid keywords (showcase 5 keywords for free, rest for a fee) and most importantly cost per click (CPC) for each specific keyword and estimated monthly spending on each specific keyword; top visited pages in the specific website; organic ranking history and much more.

Organic VS Paid traffic from Google over time

My conclusions from analysis, regarding CRO competition

Main traffic source for CRO companies is coming from Google Search
Paid search ads are rather small part, comparing to organic search
Organic search is mainly driven by 2 activities: writing blog posts/ case studies/ whitepapers/ articles with right SEO methodology. And becoming partners of big companies, like Shopify, BigCommerce etc. What I mean by this is - by writing any form of article and including right keywords your article will pop up in the google search for people, who are looking for specific topic
Seemingly there is no point in spending money on ads in social media as on average it accounted only for 0,2% - 3% of all traffic sources (for companies I was interested in)

It was that easy-to-get needed information: get list of companies, find free of charge databases (containing needed information) and then do the analysis and make conclusions.

Thank you, internet!