Hi, community. My name is Aleksandr. Nice to meet you all.
In the latest Crayon’s report on Competitive Intelligence, I noticed a very important thing - it seems like many professionals care about competitors’ website, content, and social media profiles. The strange thing for me was that I didn’t see anything related to competitors’ ads.
The question to the community: Do you ever keep track of competitors’ ads? Be it online like google search ads, media ads, and Facebook ads, or offline ads like print ads or billboards?
If so, what tools do you use?
P.S. I found some Crayon's media ads as of August 2019.
Hey Aleksandr! I'm also curious about any tools that people like to use to track competitive ads. I don't use any formal tool, but competitors' ads are invaluable for understanding their positioning in relation to the rest of the market. For example, if they are positioning themselves as a cheaper alternative, it's important for me to know that so I can create competitive assets that prepare my stakeholders to anticipate pricing objections.
Hi Christian, Thanks for your reply. I know a couple of tools for tracking competitors' ads. Some of them are free, like Facebook Ad Library, which is a great tool to see all the competitors' ads by region. Some of them are more comprehensive and paid, like Advertising Research by SEMrush. The most important for me in searching for competitors' ads is to find web pages that are promoted. Knowing these pages gives me an idea of what product category and service my competitors bet on. Also, I can sometimes spot special offers. This is the example of Crayon.co landing pages on Google ads in the US in December:
Speaking of competitors' pricing, I have seen a couple of examples when competitors list their prices in the text of the ad on Google. This can be especially helpful to figure out their pricing strategy.
What do you think about it?