Benchmark Your Advertising vs the Competitors

Identify keywords where your competitors are advertising where you may not be running ads or may be weaker in your spend.

• Step 1: Identify relevant competitor brands
• Step 2: View a side-by-side comparison of your brand advertising vs competitors

Step 1: Identify relevant competitor brands

Note: If you already have a list of competitor brands from another source you can skip to step 2 and use that list.

Setting up the Report

1. Start by navigating to the Brand Finder Report.
2. Select the Category Tree(s) where you want to identify competitors. Change the filter type from “is” to “starts with” to include all subcategories as well.
3. Alternatively you can input top keywords where you expect your competition to appear. Keep in mind that if your input categories/keywords are too broad the competitors displayed may be less relevant.
4. Run the report and select target competitive brands from the Top Brands in Search tile.

How to use the data

This report provides a list of brands ordered by their overall search performance in relevant keywords. You will use this list to input specific competitive brands in the next steps.

When selecting a limited list of brands from this list, note that the table includes details on the breadth of each brand’s keyword sponsorship. While the table’s default sort shows overall top performing competitors, you can click the column heading on ATF Keywords (Sponsored) to instead show the brands advertising on the most keywords. This will help you identify heavy advertisers among your competitors.

Step 2: View a side-by-side comparison of your brand advertising vs competitors

Setting up the Report

1. Start by navigating to the Competitive Sponsored Search Intelligence Report.
2. In the Brand filter paste a list of competitive brands (from step 1) as well as your own brand name. For report readability we recommend no more than 5 competitors in this report.
3. In the more filters section set the Is Branded Keyword filter to no.
4. Run the report and view the first table for competitor details

How to use the data

This report shows keywords where the selected brands are currently advertising in terms of each brand’s sponsored items and sponsorship activity. Keywords are sorted first by the number of selected brands sponsoring on the keyword and then by Search Volume Percentile. 

The first table allows you to quickly identify which keywords your competitors are actively sponsoring on where your brand is not sponsoring products. Clicking a brand’s Sponsored Items will also show you a list of which items they are sponsoring for the keyword to give you a better sense of how that sponsorship looks on-site.

Underneath the first table you can view a few more breakouts for these top competitors. The bar chart on the left shows how much sponsorship each brand is doing and what types of sponsorship they are using. This can give you a sense of how your ad spend compares against your competitors as well as what ad types are working for those brands.

On the right the All Brand Sponsored Items by Brand/Ad Type table shows the different items your competitors are sponsoring, ranked in order by how much Sponsorship Activity each ad is getting. Higher Sponsorship Activity means the ad is displayed across more keywords more frequently and shows where your competitors’ top advertising priorities are.