Speaker 1: What if I told you that you could see how much any of your competitors were spending on ads? And I don't just mean their search ads, I mean their display ads, their video ads on YouTube, how much they're spending on their social media ads. And what if I told you that as well as the ad spend, you could see the history of their ad account, i.e. which ads they have been running for a long time, i.e. the ones that work, and which ones they just ran for a short amount of time before killing, i.e. the ones that didn't work. Well, I might just be about to become your new best friend. Now, many marketers think of this as the holy grail of competitor analysis. Yes, we can use tools like SEMrush to see where our competitors are getting their organic traffic from, which keywords they're targeting, which pages are ranking. And yes, we can see some of the advertising metrics as well, so we can see which phrases they're targeting in search and how much they're spending on each of these. But when it comes to pay-per-click and particularly display ads, video ads, and social media ads, we're operating much more in the dark. No longer. Check this out. Here's how much Apple is spending on their display, their social, and their video ads over the last 12 months in the US. And here's how that split has changed over time. Here are the ads that they're running, here are the different campaigns they're running, and how much they're spending on each, the number of impressions they're getting, and the top publishers, i.e. the sites that they're advertising on. Here's fashion brand Boohoo.com. Same thing, the amount that they're spending, where they're spending it, how they're buying these ads, the creative that they're running, and where they are spending their budget. Here's Teemu running one of the most aggressively ramped ad campaigns I've ever seen, going from about 5 million in spend per week to about 30 million in spend per week in the space of two months. Works for B2B as well. Here's Oracle. You get the gist. And in case you're wondering, yes, this works with your competitors too. So today, I'm going to show you the witchcraft that makes this possible, how to use it, and most importantly, how to take all of this data and use it to actually make more money from your digital marketing. Now, the tool that allows us to do this is actually an app for SEMrush by AdClarity. Now, if you log into SEMrush, you'll probably see this tab called the App Center. And if you're anything like me, you never will have clicked on it because who clicks on unknown tabs in a menu? Actually, there are loads of really useful apps in there. Now, AdClarity is definitely my favorite, but I'm going to show you some of the others a little bit later on. And if you think this looks awesome, you can get a free trial of it at exposure.ninja forward slash wow. Now, this is a paid tool. And as you can probably guess from the data that it's giving you, it's not cheap, but you can get a free trial at exposure.ninja forward slash wow so that you can have a play with it. So there are actually three versions of AdClarity. You have the display ad version. A display can be really useful when you're analyzing larger competitors. There is a social and video version, which shows you the ads that they're running on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and stuff like that. And this can be really useful, particularly if you've seen that a competitor is running ads in Facebook ad library, for example, but you don't know exactly how much they're spending. Or if you want an overall picture of all of their spend, then the all advertising channels is the one to go for. Now, in my research and for my personal usage, when I'm looking at brands, I've found the social and video one the most useful. But of course, having that additional display data also lets you see whether a brand is putting more emphasis in display, which is fairly common for B2B and larger organizations. Okay, so how does this thing actually work? Well, when you open the AdClarity app, you first need to choose an advertiser. You can search by publisher or campaign or even the different keywords. So let's say that you wanted to have a look at what other sportswear brands were doing. For example, you could type in sportswear, but I found AdClarity to be most useful when you're looking at a specific brand. So let's say that we want to have a look at what AO.com is doing. We would then click on it. Now we can choose other advertisers if we want to, but right now I don't, so I just hit submit. And I'm then going to see all their data. Obviously, you can choose the time period and you can also choose the location. So let's say I'm going to go to UK here and I'm going to have a look at all channels. Now I might want to filter this later on by display, video or social, but right now I just want to get an overall picture of what they're doing. So up at the top here, we get some initial data, such as how many impressions they're getting over that time period and approximately how much they've spent over that time period and how that has changed compared to the previous period. We can then see what's called ad type distribution. And this is the split of the share between social ads, so ads that are run on social media sites, banner ads, i.e. ads that are run on Display Network and other publisher sites, and then video, so ads that are run on YouTube. We can also see how they're buying these ads as well, whether they're buying them programmatically through an ad network or direct with the publishers. One of the most useful charts is this trend piece. Now I wish you could look at all of these three things together, but to be honest, impressions and spend often map to each other really closely. So I usually just go straight for comparing spend to publishers. And this shows you how each of these ad channels has changed over time, both the amount that they're spending and the number of publishers or websites that these ads are being seen on. You can then see a breakdown per channel, all of the data that you would expect, for example, the percentage of distribution, the number of impressions, the share of voice and their total spend on this channel. Then the real juicy stuff, the ads themselves. Next to each piece of ad creative, you get even more data. For example, you can see this is an animated banner. This one is a video. You can see when this ad creative was first seen. You can see approximately how much they've spent on an ad, how many impressions it's had. If you click on any of these ads, you get even more info. For example, you can see the dimensions. You can see when it was seen. You can see the publishers that it was seen on. You can also go to the landing page and you can see the whole campaign that this ad was a part of. I don't even want to know how they've got this data. That's just looking at one competitor at a time, but we can compare competitors as well to see how their budgets have changed over time. All right, Tim, sure. It's cool to see competitor ads. Yeah, it's a bit fun to see how much they're spending, but voyeurism doesn't pay. How do we actually use this info to make money? I'm so glad you asked. Let's do some case studies and see what we can learn. Now, we're going to have a look at a mixture of B2B and B2C brands. We're going to have a look at some e-com, some software. We're going to have a look at a range of different businesses here and I'm going to be drawing out the principles that you can use and the juicy nuggets that you can learn from this type of analysis when you're looking at your competitors. Okay, we're going to start by having a look at Smile Direct Club in the US. This is the direct consumer orthodontics company. Now, of course, like we've seen, we can see exactly how much they're spending. $13 million on these channels over the last 12 months in the US. We can see how many impressions these ads are getting and we can see the split of their different ad types. Now, one of the most useful areas in all of this reporting is this, the trends, because this is where you can see how advertiser budgets have changed over time. Now, why might advertiser budgets change? Well, hopefully, it's because they're testing and measuring these different ad channels. Now, here we can see that Smile Direct Club's ad spend on social, the blue line, has significantly increased. Now, we can see that they tested video ads and put some serious budget behind it, hundreds of thousands of dollars, before eliminating this spend almost back to nothing. Now, if we're competing with this, we might look at that and say, hmm, interesting, maybe those video ads weren't working as well for them, which is why they've taken that budget and put it behind social instead. So, what about the creative? What can we learn from analyzing their creative? Well, the first thing that we can learn is the sort of messages that they're prioritizing in their advertising. Now, these are the top ads and we can sort these by impressions, the most recent ads, or the duration, i.e. we can see the ads that they've been running for the longest amount of time. Well, again, if they are tracking their ad performance, which we would hope they are at this level of spend, then this gives us an indication of what their proven ads are, their controls. So, we can see, for example, some of the questions that they are taking on in their advertising. Are doctors involved with my treatment? This is perhaps an objection or a question that they've identified in their potential customers that they want to make sure they're answering for people in that buyer journey. Now, if we wanted to, we could filter these ads by display, video, or social. Let's say that we just wanted to see the ads on social, for example, we would hide the display and video ads, and then we get their highest duration social media ads. Now, if I'm a competitor, I'm looking through this thinking, okay, clearly user-generated content style seems to be working. They've added their Smile Direct logo, they've added some sort of topping and tailing, but this is very much a user-generated style ad campaign. We've got some green screen type things as well, and we can see that this ad creative keeps coming up over and over again. This particular ad uses a cool visual hook, then goes straight into a sort of UGC type thing. We can see they've spent 25K on it on Facebook for 2.8 million impressions, and they ran it for about six and a half months. Now, if we saw ads by impressions, we can see that they're running some location-targeted ads as well on social. Here's one targeting Sacramento, Denver, Orlando, and it's basically the same ad creative each time, so this would be super easy to roll out. Here's an ad that they've been running on TikTok. They've spent over $120,000 on it. They've had 11 million impressions, so clearly it's working. So if I'm competing against them, I'm calibrating myself with the sort of ad creative that looks like it's working when I'm coming up with my own ads. Okay, let's take a look at another example. This time B2B, we're going to have a look at GoDaddy, again in the US across all channels. So we can see their trend data, this time quite different. Yes, they're increasing their social ad spend, but this has been a business that's been very heavily investing in display ads over time. And again, we can see their trends. This has been a business that has been very heavily investing in video ads in particular, spending up to a couple of million dollars a week, but it's actually their social media ads that are now taking off. Interesting. But you can go into even more granularity having a look at a specific ad campaign that GoDaddy has been running, and look at how that spend has changed over time. Here we're looking at the domain names campaign for GoDaddy. So if I'm a competitor for domain names, hosting and online marketing tools, I'm having a look at this to see how their spend on this channel has changed. But you can go into even more detail. For example, if you find an ad that sells the thing that you're competing with, you can click on see full campaign report, and then you get a full breakdown of how spend on that campaign has changed over time. So here's the domains plus commerce, get a domain and start selling online, and how this spend has changed on time. Look at these big peaks and troughs. That tells you either this is a seasonal thing, or they're ramping up spend quite aggressively as they need to hit targets each quarter. Again, we can see the messages that they're really pushing. So in this case, it's very much about a price driven initial offer. That's the thing that they're selling. There are some smaller messages around privacy protection and choosing the largest domain registrar. So building on the credibility that GoDaddy has. But most of the time, these ads are focused on the cost. And these are the ones that have seen the largest amount of budget behind them. Just as interesting to see the stuff that's working, you can also see the stuff that maybe hasn't worked so well. So for example, here we've got a video ad that GoDaddy put a load of budget behind, but for a very short period of time. So this was only live for sort of a month and a half. And whilst it's a beautiful looking ad, there's very little here, which feels proprietary to GoDaddy. This is a very brand driven ad. Having watched this, I don't really understand the message. I don't know why I should buy from GoDaddy versus anyone else. So I'm not massively surprised if this ad hasn't performed, but by seeing the data here and seeing how short lived this campaign was, I would then look at this and say, okay, maybe we don't want to go in that type of direction because obviously they've put some serious spend behind this and decided that they need to pull the ad. This tool could also be really useful to find new publishers or websites to run your ads on. For example, if we segment this down by just looking at display ads, we can see the top publishers that the ads in this campaign have been run on. And we can see in this case that Amazon has had 81% of the total impressions in this ad campaign. You may not have thought as Amazon as a display ad publisher for a site like GoDaddy, but here we can see how much budget they're putting behind Amazon. And remember this data is just for this specific ad campaign. Let's have a look at a much higher ticket advertising proposition. This time B2B in software with salesforce.com. So Salesforce is selling software to really enterprise clients and it's got a very high ticket sales. So it'll be interesting to see how their advertising channels are different and what messages they're using to get their customers. Now, firstly, they're not spending anywhere near as much as some of the advertisers that we've looked at here. Still over a million dollars a year and growing, which tells us that this is probably working out for them. As we get down to the top ad section, we can see the approach that Salesforce is taking. This is very much about promoting guides, getting downloads and eBooks and that type of thing. And some of these ads were very topical. For example, how can you help mobile workers stay confident and motivated during COVID? Whereas others are a little bit more evergreen like this 50 best practices for email marketers. So if this is your strategy, you could take a look at some of the ad creative and take inspiration from it. For example, here's one that says, find out how one field service leader cut onsite visits by 80%. I can't read any of the copies. This isn't a particularly great ad, but you can click on the campaign landing page to go through to the page that this ad is driving to. And if you were looking to generate B2B leads for high revenue service, you could take some inspiration from this landing page or not, it's not actually that good because we can see there is a CTA down here. We can't really read much of this text and it's pretty generic information. But my hope is that they're probably retargeting you based on visiting this page so they can run more tailored ads to you, knowing that you're interested in field sales. And in fact, we can tell that this probably didn't work because again, they haven't run the ad for very long and they're no longer running it. Of course, this is only one way to use SEMrush for competitive analysis. We have another video, which you can see in the description, which shows how to get more competitive insight around things like SEO and search ads. But this level of data about display, video and social ads is extraordinary. Like I said, there's a few different versions of ad clarity. If you just wanna have a look at the display ad data, then there's that one. If you wanna have a look at social and video, then there's that one. Or if you wanna have a look at all of them, then you've got the mega one. You can get a free trial at exposure.ninja.com so you can do some digging immediately. Of course, once you've got ad clarity, you're gonna want to log into SEMrush and go to the app center, which is this tab here. And then you can see all of the apps. Now there are actually loads of other apps too. If you click on all apps, you'll see there's a whole bunch of other ones. Ad clarity is there, which is by far my favorite. Now I've had a play with some of these and found them to be really useful. You can check out stuff like media monitoring, which helps you find brand mentions so you can get links from them. E-commerce keyword analytics, which is kind of exactly what it says. And audience intelligence, which is customer segments and insights. Another one of my favorite apps is BuzzGuru Influencer Analytics. This allows you to do loads of stuff around influencer marketing. For example, if you wanna know how much it's gonna cost to work with a particular influencer, they've got some indications of the prices per sponsor project and how much reach they're likely to get. Or if you wanna find influencers that promoted one of your competitors, you can search by keywords to say which TikTok posts have included my competitors. And then you see a list of all the TikTok posts have included your competitors, how many likes, how many views each one has got. So then if you wanted to work with one of these influencers, you could just see who gets the most views for them and go reach out to those people. Now, these are all paid apps, but the level of data and insight you can get from them is wild. And they all have free trials through exposure.ninja.com so you can experiment, have a play before you decide to subscribe. Now, honestly, this is the tool that I didn't know if I would ever see. We've had a meta ad library allowing us to see what ads competitors are running on Facebook for some time. But being able to see the spend data, how that spend has changed over time and display and video ad spend as well is insane and so useful to be able to reverse engineer competitor ad campaigns. I've really enjoyed playing with this. Go and get a free trial from exposure.ninja.com and let me know in the comments what you discover. Until next time, see you soon. Bye-bye.