How Competitor Ads Analysis Can Boost Your Paid Media Performance

When it comes to running paid media in 2025, there’s one thing you can be certain of: your competitors are visible and they’re fighting for the same audience and space as you.

But just how do you go about competing in a landscape where budgets are tight and attention is limited? Whether PPC, Paid Social, Programmatic and anything in between, ignoring what your competitors are doing (or not doing) is leaving money on the table.

In this blog, we thought it might be useful to run through one of the key solution builders to high competition, the tried and trusted competitor ads analysis. What they are, why they are important, and how they can prove the difference to your paid marketing strategy.

Shall we get started?

What Competitor Ads Analysis Really Does 

So for the 1% of you wondering ‘why bother with competitor analysis?’, the answer lies in context and understanding the climate where you are operating. Think of it like this, if you go into a sporting final with no insight into how your opponent is going to play (despite understanding the sport landscape), you’re already setting yourself off on the backfoot.

It’s the same on paid media competitor analysis.

Without it, you’re essentially marketing in a vacuum, unaware of the successful tactics, and trends shaping your audience’s expectations within an industry. When done well, this kind of analysis becomes a powerful lever for performance and help skyrocket you’re overall performance. Below are just a handful of benefits that a successful competitor analysis can bring.

Visibility

It starts with visibility. If an analysis shows that competitors are showing up more frequently or in more prominent positions, whether that’s in search results, social feeds, or display placements, understanding exactly why can be paramount to optimising your own ad visibility.

It could be the case that they are simply bidding higher and have greater budgets, – in which case you can research into cheaper keywords, placements etc to target – perhaps (for paid social) they are using more compelling creatives, or simply they are occupying the right channels at the right time?

By knowing and understanding these insights you can amend your own campaigns and ads to best optimise visibility.

Improved Engagement

By reviewing exactly how competitors are framing their offers, what messaging they’re leading with, and how they speak to their audience, you can understand exactly how they are engaging with audiences in the market as well as their core USPs.

From this it is easy to identify the opportunities and potentials to differentiate your brand. For instance, it might be the case that your ad engagement is lower than industry benchmarks. Researching into your competitors you might see that they are focusing on price while you focus on quality, exclusivity, or customer experience. Or perhaps they’re using urgency and limited-time language, which is driving users to convert quicker.

That’s the cue to A/B test similar tactics and see what impact it has on overall engagement.

Creatives 

This is more so relevant for paid social, however definitely plays a role with Google Ads and 100% programmatic.

An ad creative and ad type tells us a lot. Whether it be Static vs video or product-led vs emotive creatives, analysing format trends and creative shifts gives us a clearer picture of what’s resonating with relevant industry audiences. By understanding this we can again turn to our trusty A/B tests to trial out some new creatives and understand test how your ads can have a stronger impact.

Results

And finally, it might sound strange, but a detailed competitor analysis can give additional weight to your results.

Think about it, it’s always fantastic to see that performance improve but when taken relative to the industry and competitors, it’s another to know they’re outperforming the wider market. On a month-by-month basis there could be plenty of reasons why performance is up or down (seasonality, media spend changes etc), however seeing improvement and knowing that you are more visible than your competitor MoM highlights how the brand has grown within the market.

The Insights That Matter Most

With this in mind, the below signify some of the key insights that we look for when compiling a competitor analysis.

• Messaging strategy: Are they leading with offers? Leaning into lifestyle? Using time-limited urgency or subtle luxury cues?
• Creative format & consistency: From static ads to video carousels, what’s being tested, what’s working, and how it evolves over time.
• Audience clues: Based on visuals, copy and targeting style, who are they really speaking to?
• Landing page experience: Does it back up the ad promise, or fall flat?
• Search positioning & impression share: Are they bidding harder than you on your top terms? Are they climbing above you in the auction?

Each of these insights helps us shape a clearer, more informed roadmap for your account, and in many cases, the optimisations off the back of this analysis directly improve your ROI.

Your Competitors Aren’t Always Who You Think

One of the most important things that other digital marketers tend to forget is that in competitor analysis is that your most competitive brands taking the most ad market share might not be the main players you expect. Just because someone’s not in your immediate category or someone you are immediately aware of doesn’t mean they’re not competing for your audience’s clicks.

At Talking Stick Digital we break your competitors down into three groups:

Direct competitors: These are the brands offering the same product or service to the same audience as you. The usual suspects if you were and the key brands you are likely already aware of.

Indirect competitors: These are brands targeting the same audience but offering something slightly different. These competitors are often missed or not thought about but are just as important as the Direct Competition as they are targeting/ competing for Attention from the same audiences.

SERP/feed competitors: Sometimes, the people competing with us in the ad space aren’t even in the same industry. These are competitors to keep an eye on but play a far lower part in any competitor analysis.

Ready to See Where You Stand? 

If you’re curious about how your ads compare and what you could be doing better, get in touch today for a free audit. We will show you what we can do to find the gaps to help you outpace your competition.

FAQs: 

Below are a handful of the recently asked questions with regards to our paid media competitor analysis process:

How often should you perform a competitor analysis? 

At a minimum, quarterly, but ideally monthly. Platforms and strategies evolve fast, and staying reactive isn’t enough anymore.

Will analysing competitors just make us copy them? 

Not at all. The goal is to identify trends, gaps, and opportunities, then build a smarter, more original strategy off the back of it.

Can this help if our ads account is already doing “okay”? 

Absolutely. Some of our best results have come from mature accounts where small insights from competitor activity led to big shifts in performance.

How do you access this information?

We use a combination of tools (like Meta Ads Library, Google Auction Insights, and Google Ads Transparency Centre) alongside our team’s expertise to interpret the data properly.