In the Age of e-Commerce, the consumer has instant access to almost any available product, as well as the power to compare prices offered by different companies practically instantaneously.
As a business, this means that you need to stay ahead of what other companies are offering and how they are attracting clientele to their webpages instead of yours.
Your website defines you as a brand and your industry should complement the style your prospects expect. e.g. we notice when building landing pages for Lawyers, attorneys, we follow a certain unsaid guide.
These landing pages look professional and build trust and authority. However, when building a landing page for a mobile app the landing page is creative, unique, and has a unique style which would be quite different to a legal landing page.
When you track competitor landing pages, check out what Conversion rate elements, trust icons, testimonial style your competitors use. This insight is very helpful as this would mean when you build out your own landing page you will include some of the learnings from your competition, which in essence would mean your prospects would feel at home as they would expect these signals.
Fortunately, there is a multitude of tools available online that help you to monitor your competition in terms of their advertising, SEO techniques, rankings, paid search landing pages, and websites.
A landing page is a self-contained webpage that the consumer is redirected to after following a link from a web search, email, or social media advert. They are designed for a specific purpose, such as targeted advertising, a sales campaign, accumulating subscribers, or increasing SEO ranking.
Generally, the landing page gives the consumer a call to action (CTA), and when this action is completed, it is referred to as a conversion.
Monitoring competitor landing pages allow you to stay ahead of the curve. By monitoring how your competition attracts their web traffic, you have the opportunity to target the same audience and drive it to your company’s webpages. In other words, you can put strategies in place to attract their customers to your business.
1. How the competition is getting traffic to their landing page (SEO ranking, keywords, advertising campaigns)
2. What the consumer is seeing once they get there
3. The conversion rate of the landing page
There are several tools that can help you to monitor your competition’s web traffic. As with any resource, there are tools which offer useful quality data and other tools that do not.
Ideally, a spy tool should help you to monitor your competitor’s ads, traffic sources, traffic volume, keywords, and campaign lifespan. It is not enough to merely monitor your competitor landing pages - you also need to monitor how they are acquiring traffic and how successful their landing pages are.
To conduct an accurate competitor comparison, you’ll want to look into the tools below:
You should be monitoring both the paid search (PPC) keywords and phrases that your competitor uses, as well as their organic keyword rankings.
A tool that allows the monitoring of both of these categories of keywords is Keyword Spy. Importantly, it also monitors the cost factors involved, such as budget statistics - which are projections of the competition’s PPC budget, CPC, search volume and other traffic indicators.
A useful feature of Keyword Spy is the free keyword lists function, which generates lists of keywords and the companies currently bidding on them. For example, the highest costing keywords and the biggest ad spenders.
This serves as a tool for individuals new to keyword optimization to get an overview of the industry as a whole. Unlike many online competitive intelligence services, Keyword Spy offers a limited free trial version. However, more detailed for-pay packages are available starting at $995 monthly.
SE Ranking is a competitive intelligence tool that aids in monitoring both PPC and SEO keywords, as well as a whole host of other information. It’s an amazing first step to finding out how you perform in comparison to competitors.
Firstly, SE Rankings helps you to identify both your organic and PPC competitors by generating a full competitor list for each search query, a list of historical advertisers, top-performing keywords, and ads. Additionally, it helps you to discover which keywords your competitor’s ads and landing pages are ranked for, also providing ranking data.
SE Ranking offers a two-week free trial period, with their cheapest full package starting at $39/month and the most expensive at $189/month.
A native advert is an ad format that does not stand out as an advert - rather, it matches the look, feels and tone of the page on which it appears. An example of this would be an ad on Facebook that promotes a company’s post, rather than a banner advert on the bottom of the screen.
A service that monitors these native ads is Native Ad Buzz. Their services are two-tiered. The first tier is the Advertiser Page, which shows all the adverts from a competitor. The second tier is the more advanced Advertiser Search Tool, which generates an analysis of their internet traffic, shows the landing pages linked to each advert, and ranks the relative performance of each landing page.
Native Ad Buzz can help you reverse-engineer your competitor’s ads, giving you confidence that your ads will perform as well as possible.
Their pricing starts at $7.
Unmetric is an advert monitoring tool that specifically aids in monitoring social media campaigns.
They monitor not only banner ads and pop-ups, but also hashtags, likes, comments, and tweets related to your competitors. As social media grows, it is essential to monitor how much traffic is directed to your competitor landing pages.
Additionally, Unmetric constantly monitors your competition and alerts you to new campaigns and changes in social media behaviour.
Their pricing ranges from a free package to an in-depth analysis package at $1000/month.
On Google Ads, your competitors are quite easily visible for ad campaigns you’re running and for the keywords you’re bidding on.
The Auction Insights Report in Google Ads provides all kinds of useful information about your competitors’ campaigns and also compares your performance with other advertisers.
Let’s dig deep into how you can use Auction Report to understand how to stack up against your competition
You can also choose to see the reports at the ad group, campaign, or even the individual keyword level.
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The Auction Report will provide important data points about your competitors and check the following in-depth insights:
Check competitor domains spending their ad budget on the same keywords as you
Check out the average position in which your ad is shown
Check how frequently your ads are being shown compared to your competitors
With this data, you can really help to highlight new and untapped opportunities to benchmark your performance
The best thing about Facebook is that you can quickly peek into the strategies your competitors are using to engage with their audience.
Here’s how you can spy on your competitors using Facebook
One of the best competitor research tools to come out on Facebook in recent years is the new “Page Transparency” tab on every Facebook business page where the majority of information is publicly available for consumption.
Once you click on see all link, a pop up appears and when you scroll down it will show up if the page id running ads.
Once you click on the Ad library, you’ll be taken to a tab which shows all the ads run by the competitor.
The other biggest advantage of Ads library is you can check what landing pages your competitors are using.
Within the ad library, click on the CTA button, “Shop Now” to understand where the traffic is going down.
It could be either a destination Url of the main website or a landing page. This information helps to identify different actions you want your audience to carry out depending on your marketing campaign.
The possibility of information you can get from Facebook is endless and is absolutely free to use all the core features.
Backlinks are the number of links that are shared by other sites to direct them to your landing page or website. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher your organic search engine ranking. This makes backlinking an important tool in any SEO campaign.
Ahrefs Spy Tool currently has the largest live backlink data index, and their bots constantly crawl through the web to provide up-to-date data. Ahrefs also offers a host of other tools, such as web monitoring, competitive analysis, keyword research, rank tracking, and content research.
Their pricing starts at $99/month for their ‘lite’ package, with their agency package costing $999 per month. They also offer a trial version, starting at $7.
Competitor Landing Page Analysis Using Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the best competitor analysis tool which can easily get you hold of your competitors PPC landing pages with all the critical information in one view.
Let’s get started on how to see competitor PPC landing pages using Ahrefs.
Under Keywords explorer, you can search your PPC keywords and uncover what your competitors are doing for that particular keyword and determine the most effective landing pages that work in your niche.
Keywords Explorer > Enter Your PPC keyword > Choose Country > Enter Search
Let’s suppose you want to find competitive landing pages for a target keyword software development, in the US.
Here you can find a lot of information about the keyword, like, search volume, CPC, keyword suggestions and a lot of other metrics.
To uncover information about specific advertisers and their landing page strategies for your targeted PPC keyword, go to ads history in the left-hand navigation.
Under Ads History, you can find 3 different tabs
By Domain
By Landing Page
All Ads
By Domain Tab: It shows you the traffic or the number of ads for a particular domain.
By Landing Page Tab: It shows you all the different landing pages run across different URLs for your target keyword.
All Ads Tab: It shows you the actual text and the copy of the ad that your competitors are using across that keyword.
To get a useful snapshot of competitor PPC activity and the alignment of their ads and landing pages, let’s go through by domain tab.
Here you can find different domains and what ads they’re running, and what landing pages they’re using.
In our example, we found the highest-performing advertiser, Chetu. This company has been running ads from 2015 and has 95 different types of ads running currently. This indicates that definitely, their ads work, otherwise, they wouldn’t be spending that much of money on Google ads.
If you click on each of these ads, they will open up on their landing pages.
From here you can dig deep and track competitor landing pages over time.
To make the best use of your competitor’s data, I would recommend doing the following :
Find different domains who bid on your “target keyword” and are running successfully for quite a while
Click through to each competitor to see their ads and landing pages
Bookmark landing pages under chrome for research purpose
Go through competitor landing pages one by one, and see what bits they’re doing
Research about sending traffic to a dedicated landing page versus dedicated microsite or a homepage
These are the key steps of how you can use Ahrefs to see competitor landing pages, that draws out meaningful insights. You can track, compare your competitors landing pages and finally put together different offers and landing page designs to improve your conversions.
AdPlexity markets themselves as ‘the world’s best competitive intelligence service’. Whilst we cannot support or deny this claim, they are a market leader in the spy tools industry.
There are several different AdPlexity tools available. The tool we’ll be focusing on today is AdPlexity Desktop, which focuses on monitoring your competitor landing pages.
They monitor traffic sources such as ads, social media and emails, and map the chain of URLs that users are following to arrive at the particular landing page. Furthermore, they monitor outgoing URLs which the customer is redirected to after visiting the landing page, as well as conversion rates.
Currently, AdPlexity Desktop is $199/per month. Other tools offered by AdPlexity include AdPlexity mobile, AdPlexity Push and AdPlexity eCommerce.
iSpionage is a multi-faceted competitive intelligence company, with tools allowing you to monitor competitor landing pages, PPC keywords, organic keywords, competitors’ SEO strategies, and conversion rates.
It monitors the organic keyword ranking of different competitors’ landing pages, showing images and descriptions of the landing pages in question. A benefit of iSpionage is that it generates a weekly report which details your competitor’s SEM (search engine marketing) performance, campaign funnel, A/B test results, SERP Snapshots, and landing pages.
Their pricing begins at $59/month for the starter package and increases to a top-tier custom package, which is priced on a per-case basis.
In iSpionage, find Competitor Research > and type in your competitor’s URL.
Once the report loads, you’ll see a complete competitive overview that includes the entire Adword strategy, monthly advertising budget, top PPC keyword data, competitor landing pages and much more.
This is the goldmine of information to see where your competitors are advertising and what their ads look like to improve your own marketing campaigns.
SpyFu is a multifunctional web tool that helps you to monitor the SEO strategy, high-ranking keywords and ads of your competition.
A particularly useful feature is Kombat, which runs a domain comparison of shared organic keywords. This helps you to compare keywords that you and your competitor both use, and how you rank comparatively.
By providing a visual aid in the form of a Venn Diagram, SpyFu produces user-friendly, quality data. All relevant keywords are characterised as ‘the keyword universe’ in which your core-niche is defined. Additionally, your weaknesses are identified - the keywords that your competitors rank for, and you do not.
Exclusive wins are keywords that you rank for, and your competitors do not. Exclusive wins may be a positive sign - for example; it may show that you have tapped into a market that your competitor has not yet identified. Or, it could be a negative sign - showing that you are wasting time with keywords that have little or no audience.
Spyfu is a paid tool with membership prices ranging $33-299/month.
SimilarWeb is a service set apart by their focus on the customer journey. They highlight the following key stages:
Awareness: the customer becomes aware of a particular service, product or offer
Consideration: the customer considers potential providers from which to purchase
Evaluation: the customer evaluates different potential providers
Purchase: the customer purchases from their provider of choice
Experience: the customer experiences the product and influences future buyers
They offer services including market mapping and benchmarking, customer behaviour analytics, channel acquisition, and funnel optimization, all about your competition.
This tool provides a multi-step analysis, analyzing the market by identifying critical competitive players. It allows you to compare your customer demographics, channel acquisition, and conversion rates to that of the competition.
Their pricing ranges from the first basic free option to an enterprise subscription.
With SimilarWeb, you can research tons of data points and information about your competitors PPC Landing Pages.
Once you click on search keyword analysis, type in your target keyword to analyze your competitor’s strategies & identify search traffic trends for your keyword.
From here, you can uncover invaluable data for your PPC target keyword and view the following for each competitor:
Search Volume
CPC Estimation
Search Visits
Traffic Share
Position on the search engine results page
You can narrow your investigation by scrolling down the page to find the top competitors for your keyword.
If you click on the destination URL, you can directly jump into your competitor’s landing page.
With Builtwith, you can understand what technology is used on your competitor’s website or landing page.
To illustrate what BuiltWith offers, let’s examine our agency’s landing page which is hosted on Unbounce.
This tool specializes in peeking through technologies like advertising networks, ActiveCampaign, Hotjar, eCommerce platforms, CMS, analytics, JavaScript resource library and others.
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Hexowatch is a sophisticated tool to continuously monitor your competitor websites or landing pages for any changes in content, target keyword, visual, price change, or availability of a service or product and any news relevant to your competitor.
Set up a notification channel
Set Up monitoring frequency
Click on the preview
Once the monitor has been set up, you’ll receive an email or a Slack notification whenever your competitor makes a change on a website or a landing page.
Here are simple 10 ways to outsmart your competition:
Make your PPC ads relevant to your landing pages stop sending traffic to your website’s homepage.
Do not put any hyperlinks on your landing page which could distract your prospect.
Use less jargon on your page and keep it simple to understand.
Make the buttons on the page stand out from the rest of the page.
Use a compelling offer which would entice your prospect to fill out the form.
Use real and natural testimonials on your landing page.
Do not use any distracting elements like carousels, sliders etc.
Make sure your page loads in less than 3 seconds.
Increase trust on your page by displaying your location and phone number.
Do not use cheesy stock photos.
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Founder & CEO of Apexure, Waseem worked in London’s Financial Industry. He has worked on trading floors in BNP Paribas and Trafigura, developing complex business systems. Waseem loves working with Startups and combines data and design to create improved User Experiences.
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