A Napier Webinar: How to Spy on Your Competitors' Ads

Have you ever wondered what ads your competitors are running? Or how you can view their ads via platforms like LinkedIn and Google?

In our on-demand webinar, we share how you can spy on your competitors’ ads, and cover:

• The tools to access your competitors’ ads
• What to look for when spying on your competitors
• How to use the intelligence to create better campaigns
• Analysis of some B2B Tech/Industrial ad campaigns
• When to stop spying

Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.

Napier Webinar: ‘How to Spy on Your Competitors’  Transcript

Speakers: Mike Maynard

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the latest Napier webinar. We’re just going to give it a minute or two because there’s a couple more people joining, and we’ll get started. So if you can just give us a minute, and then I’ll start talking about spying on your competitors.

Okay, we’ve had a couple more people join, so we’re going to start, thank you all for taking the time, for joining this webinar. I’m really interested to present this. I’m particularly interested in knowing your feedback, whether that’s questions on how you can spy on competitors more effectively, or alternatively, whether you simply have an opinion on some of the techniques we talk about, or some of the benefits. So at any time during the webinar, please feel free to throw things into chat, and if you throw something into chat, I very much welcome it. We will deal with the questions at the end. So please put questions into chat at the end, and I’ll answer them at the end, right? So we’re going to get straight into spying on competitors. This has been a really popular webinar, and quite a few have registered for it, so obviously there’s some interest in getting people to or getting an understanding of what your competitors are doing.

So let’s have a look at what we’re going to talk about today. Here we have a figure that chat GPT assures me is nothing like James Bond, because clearly, James Bond is protected by copyright, so we have a spy, and this spy is looking at finding out things about their competitors. And we’re going to go through different stages. We’re going to look at why we should spy on our competitors. May seem obvious, but we’re also going to talk about some of the disadvantages. We’re going to talk about spying on different platforms and the issues around that. We’re going to look at the issues around display ads, talk very briefly about some other marketing activities, and then have a quick summary.

So we should rush through. We’ll have quite a few examples of how to get information, and also, I’ll discuss some of the things you might learn from spying on people. So why spy on competitors? I mean, there’s lots of reasons to do that. You know, at the high level, it’s understanding their strategy and understanding their priorities. So you know where companies are spending their money on advertising is a good indication of where their priorities are. And so it’s always really useful to know whether your competitor is focusing on a particular product category or maybe promoting a podcast, or perhaps trying to get people to a webinar, so trying to understand what works for them. And obviously, if something continues consistently, it’s probably a good indication that it works. It’s not always the case. You know, so often we do see people running ads that don’t work for long periods of time, but generally speaking, a consistent long term approach means that that approach works.

The other thing we want to do is learn best practice, or put it bluntly, still, their ideas. And for sure, that’s very, very useful. But I think, you know, there are some issues in that you do want to be differentiated, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. We want to try and predict what they’re planning to do. You know, quite often the time that you know clients are really worried about what competitors are doing, is a lead up to, say, a big trade show. And a trade show, obviously, you’re investing a lot of money, not only in the booth and the floor space, but also in the time to actually man that booth. So it’s important to have some idea of what you think competitors might do. Now, sometimes that’s very easy. Other times, competitors come to the show with a big announcement. They’ve not said anything beforehand. They want to make a splash at the event, and it’s impossible to predict. So, you know, it’s a useful thing to do. It’s certainly not 100% reliable. I think you know that there’s some interesting areas around pitching for money. So clearly, one of the things that you want to do is show your bosses that you’re competing effectively against your competitors.

But if it turns out that the companies you’re competing against are spending. Significantly more money. Quite clearly, it’s hard to be competitive then, even if you’re running better, more effective ads. And so one of the useful things for spying on competitors is to get an idea of commitment and spend to different channels, and to use that to try and leverage more budget. So that’s always very helpful. There are some other things that are very useful. I mean, we recently did a project for a client that was promoting to the data center sector, and we actually found that more than one competitor was using the same image in their promotional materials, so in their LinkedIn ads, in this case, as our client, all shows at random, but obviously we’d all gone to the same image library, and we’d all chosen the best image for data centers.

So you can get some other benefits as well, particularly in terms of making sure you’re not copying you’re not taking this best practice, as you might call it, but actually you’re doing something different to stand out. And I think that brings us on to a very important point. There are reasons not to span your competitors. Quite often, people that span their competitors end up copying what the competitor does. And obviously, anytime you copy, you tend to be somewhat behind, just for the lead time of waiting till the ad runs, then you start creating something, then you launch it, you’re inevitably going to be a slow follower, and being a copycat follower is never very good for differentiation. The other thing you can end up doing is reflecting your competitors strengths.

I’d love to pretend that our clients are the strongest in every aspect of every product they make, but quite clearly, that’s not the case. And so if you start copying the competitors too much, you might end up focusing on things that when a purchaser comes to evaluate, they actually find the competitors better at. So don’t focus on your competitors’ strengths. And ultimately, I think one of the things that really makes sense is to focus on what you’re good at really play to your strengths in marketing, and to some extent, that means ignoring what the competitors do.

So whilst I would definitely recommend you know, understanding what they’re trying to do, I would strongly recommend not getting too hooked up on trying to be your competitor. Try and be individual and unique. Okay, so let’s move on to spying on competitors. One of the things you’ll find throughout this webinar is that actually finding information about your competitors is remarkably easy. This has been driven by a lot of ad transparency campaigns, particularly in the EU, but also to some extent in America and particularly around political ads, although this has subsequently resulted in companies opening up databases of all ads that run on their platform to ensure they don’t miss anything.

So let’s look at LinkedIn. LinkedIn is possibly the first platform you’d want to go to. It’s one where most companies in the B to B sector are active, and it also lets you target fairly effectively. So viewing competitors ads on LinkedIn is really easy. You search for the competitor. In this case, we’ve got a semiconductor company that’s competing with analog devices. You go to posts and then you click on ad library. So the ad library is that little text link at the bottom of the left hand column, and that takes you to the ad library. The ad library shows you all paid promotion on LinkedIn. So one of the things that can be revealing is the number of ads people are running. So here interestingly, you know, we see that analog devices are running 78 ads. That’s not a huge number. We see many companies with active ads running into the hundreds or even 1000s of ads. And those of you who’ve been on previous webinars with us will have seen when we looked at some of the advertising theory, there were management consultancy companies running literally several 1000 ads. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about exactly what’s shown, but basically, recent and current ads are shown on all of these ad libraries. The dates are all slightly different.

So the analog, sorry, the LinkedIn ad library shows ads that have appeared after June the first 2023 and one year after the last impression. So those are two rules. Effectively now we’ve gone past a year, so it’s one year after the last impression of the ad, the last time it was shown. And so you can look at the ads that are running. And here you can see, you know what? What do Analog Devices care about the moment, or battery powered devices, is fairly obvious. They’re talking about battery powered devices, and they’re also doing some recruitment as well, which is interesting. Could be saying that they’re growing and being successful. The neat thing, though, is that we can get more information so we can. Click on view details, and View Details brings us details about the specific ad. And here you can see the advertiser analog device in this case, and who paid for it. So in this particular case, Analog Devices paid for it. That doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t given agency access to run their campaigns, but it does mean that agency is not paying quite often. You’ll see an agency name there saying who’s actually running the campaigns, and it talks about all sorts of useful things. So the timeframe that the ad ran, and you can hear, you can see it’s basically been running for 10 days. Recent ad still running. You can look at the total number of impressions. And here we can see that it’s running somewhere between, say, 500 and 1000 impressions a day, so reasonably good.

We can see the targeting in terms of language. We can see the location targeting, and we can see some information about company targeting. So here we’re basically excluding companies. So annum device has gone and excluded a bunch of companies, presumably, I would guess around industry, but I’m not 100% sure. We can’t know that. What we do not get from LinkedIn is we do not get the amount that’s being spent. We do not get cost per click or cost per lead or any other data, and we do not get any details on exactly how the companies or the individuals have been targeted. So there’s very big limitations around what we get, but it gives us a good idea. However, as we’re acting as a competitor of analog devices, we’re going to try and be smug here.

So if you look at the location in the bottom right, we’re actually targeting 19 different countries, Slovakia, Hungary, and 17 others. And interestingly, although there’s 19 different countries, which you’d expect, you know, average out the countries, maybe an average of 5% of the impressions goes to each country. One country dominates. Turkey dominates, with 64% almost two thirds of the ads are going to Turkey. This may have been the intention of analog devices. I suspect it isn’t. I suspect they wanted to spread roughly equivalent to size of the economy. And although Turkey, you know, will be one of the bigger economies here. It certainly won’t be the biggest. You would think something like Hungary would also be important. It’s got a significant electronics industry too. So I’m interested whether anyone has an opinion on why there are so many ads in Turkey. You know, if you’ve got an opinion, feel free to send it into the chat. And I’ll give you a couple of seconds to do that. But if nobody can understand, I will certainly reveal why it is.

Yeah, unfortunately, we don’t. Here we go. So we’ve got one suggestion that’s to extend the market. So looking at Turkey as being a key market, that’s actually not correct. The reality is, is that there’s very little you can do to control where the ads appear. But one thing that does determine where the ads appear is the targeting language. And if we look down the bottom right, we can see the targeting language includes English. Basically, is only English. And an important thing to understand about LinkedIn, which is different from many other platforms, so this is really super important, is that LinkedIn will run local language adverts only. So if you want to target Hungary and you want to hit people that have their preferred language set to Hungarian, you have to run the ad in Hungarian. So there’s a lot of people in Hungary who set Hungarian as their their preferred language. In Turkey, people tend to be more open to English, and so the Turkish users of LinkedIn are much more likely to set their language to be English than any of the other countries. And this is why the Analog Devices is disproportionately spending money in Turkey. And as I say, it may be the case. They’ve got a whole bunch of countries. They know Turkey is the most important. They’re quite happy. It’s almost certain that Analog Devices is sat there scratching their heads, wondering why all these other countries have so little in the way of impressions. And the reason is because if they want to generate impressions at those countries, they’ve got to run ads in local language, because people will have selected that as their preferred language.

So just an interesting little aside, does it tell us that Analog Devices is not sophisticated? I don’t think so. I mean, there’s lots of reasons why you’d want to do that. For all we know, they could be running translations at the moment and looking to roll this out in local language next week, so I don’t think we can make too many assumptions, but it’s. Always nice to know that a competitor is perhaps not doing things as well as they could. If we go back to the library, when you get to the library page, you actually get search options here. So up the top you see that we can put in some search terms that can either be that can be a company which the left hand box, and it can be a topic. We can limit the search for certain countries. We can limit to certain dates the ads run, and then we can search. So here I’ve set up a search where I’m looking for Texas Instruments ads that contain the word battery, or focus on the topic of batteries, and I’m running this to search in France, I believe it was so we’ve generated a number of ads in French for the French market here. Again, the smart people will know that we’ve actually seen non local language ads here, so they’ll have limited penetration. And obviously we can do a different search. So if we look on the right hand side, now we’ve actually searched for ABB as ads, and we’ll see in France, ABB have a slightly different strategy.

So they have different language strategies for different campaigns. Some of them are all run in English. Some of them are running local language, my gut feel is that probably tells you one of the more important campaigns versus the least important. But as these are actually running for different divisions, there could be other reasons as well. Maybe it’s budget, maybe it’s time something like that. But we’ve certainly learned a little bit about what ABB is doing in France, and we know that they’re investing quite a lot of effort because they’re translating the ads, which is obviously not time consuming. One thing to mention on the search is that it is really trivially simple in terms of putting companies in and topics. So you can see here, for example, down on the bottom right, we’ve got completely irrelevant ads coming through just because the company’s name begins ABB. So we do have to apply a little bit of logic to searches on LinkedIn, because otherwise we end up with spurious results. I’ve talked a lot about LinkedIn, I’ve talked a lot about what we can learn.

The reason is, is that actually, when we look at what everybody’s doing, people have typically very similar approaches. So if we look at meta, so Facebook and Instagram, we’ve got a ads library here. We can select different categories of ads, almost certainly, I guess, the audience here will be looking at all ads, because we’re not in politics or in the special categories, and then you just enter a search term. So here again, I’ve searched for another of our clients, a client called fluke. It suggests a particular account which is Fluke Corporation, their main account, and so we click through and look at what Fluke is doing. And this will then give you, again, in a similar way, all the ads here, the default filter is active ads, so it doesn’t show you ads that have run recently, but you can filter and select More recent but finished campaigns. So we can go in and we can look at the ads and understand what are flukes, priorities. One of the interesting things that I think is worth looking at is we also have a lot of filters. So not only whether it’s active or not, and not only when the ads run, so the impressions by date. But we can also look at the type of media, if they’re doing an image or a video. We can look at which platform, so this is the meta platform, so where they’re running on Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram or the Audience Network, and also which language they’re running in.

So we can get some nice cuts of different data here when we’re looking at the ads as well, we can get some nice data about the ad. It doesn’t tell you estimated volumes. So you don’t get that information that you do get, but we do get information on platforms. So we can see here, Fluke is running across Facebook, Instagram, the Audience Network, and also Facebook Messenger, and we can also see the ad has got multiple versions. So those multiple versions might be different images or it might be different languages. So we can see quite a lot of information, very much different to LinkedIn, but still useful. One of the things, you know, for example, we’ve noticed is that face, sorry, is that Fluke has been doing some testing. So they’ve clearly been testing some ads with Audience Network and some ads without. When we went to have a look, very interesting to see that, you know, there, there’s a company, if you’re one of flukes competitors, you’d have to recognize these guys are pretty switched on. They’re looking at. Testing the various platforms and looking at what gives them the best results. So you definitely want to up your game to make sure you keep up with Fluke Google ads.

Again, very, very similar. You go to something called Google Ads Transparency Center, and in some ways the most difficult thing of all this spying on competitors is knowing the name of the platform you need to go to. And so we can go in, we can look at timescales, we can look at countries, and we can look at different platforms. So we can look at whether people are advertising on Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Play, Google Maps, all the rest of it. Typically, I think most people want to search on all platforms only, because if there’s ads outside search and YouTube, it’s kind of an interesting thing to know unless, of course, you’re maybe a channel partner, you know, distributor, where, clearly all your competitors will be very active on Google Shopping. So here we can see, you know, what’s running. Here, I’ve looked for Texas Instruments, and we can see there’s very little information. So we know who runs it, we know what the ad is, we know when it was last shown, we know the format, but that’s it. We’re not getting any information about any kind of volume. We’re not getting related ads. We’re getting very, very little. And one of the things you can do is you can employ tools to go and get you information about competitors. Now, before we talk about tools, I would say there’s a real issue in terms of quality of data, and the reason is these tools are basically running searches and seeing who advertises against them. So they’re kind of sampling what’s going on. And we have two problems in our industry. One is the volume of search is very low, so they may not even be looking at a lot of the searches that our customers are making.

And the second is is being very niche, you may not get very good information, because, again, they may not do a high volume of searches, but we can see here we ran a tool called SEMrush. SEMrush, it’s a very effective tool. It not only tells you know what’s happening and gives you ideas on the trends in terms of how much is being spent by Ti, and again, we filtered by UK and on the desktop, but it will also tell you things like how much it estimates the traffic cost and how much traffic you generated. So basically, the number of clicks and the cost per click, or the total cost, these numbers are not super accurate, again, in our industry, because we are very specific, but it’s always useful to see it as a first pass estimate.

So you can see here, I’ve highlighted the filters to let you identify what’s being run and then also highlighted the results. I strongly suspect that during this period, TI was probably running against more than 22 keywords, and probably a lot more than 22 keywords, but you know, this has picked the more common ones where SEMrush is searching for those terms. There are other tools as well. SpyFu is another very popular tool for looking at Google ads. So do feel free to try different tools and see which one makes the most impression on you. Which one gives you the best results. The next one is x, or Twitter, as it used to be called, Twitter is really interesting. It has possibly the most painful Search feature to get ad data that there is. So what happens is, is you have to enter a an advertiser, you have to put the country, put the dates, and then click create a report, and then I would strongly suggest going away for lunch and possibly a few post lunch drinks, because the interface is incredibly slow and incredibly clunky, almost like X. Didn’t want to give this information away, but it will ultimately give you a download. You can download and see what your competitors are doing on x.

Tiktok also offers a similar thing. You go into creative center and search for ads. You do have to have a login for Tiktok, which is, I think, the one tool that requires a login. But one of the things about Tiktok, I wanted to highlight is Tiktok, within their creative center, has a top ad spotlight, and they’ll highlight some of the ads they think are doing really well, and that’s obviously based on volume of likes and where they are in terms of click through rates. So. You’ll also probably find that the best performing ads all have high budgets as well. I don’t think that’s necessarily a cause of the performance things as a result of the performance doing well and the the ads being run a lot, and also possibly Tiktok picking the ads with high budget.

But anyway, the interesting thing about Tiktok is it actually puts in some commentary about the ad. So it’s actually giving tiktoks opinion of why ads are successful on the platform. Now, clearly, with us being a B to B Tech, you’re highly unlikely to see any B to B Tech ads in this top ad spotlight, but still, particularly if you’re new to tick tock or maybe, dare I say, you feel like you’re a little older than the typical Tiktok user. I think the top ad spotlight is an underrated feature to try and understand what you can do with your ads to make them more effective. So those are really all the social platforms. We simply look at a couple of other areas. One is display ads. You know, who’s running ads on different publications websites, or indeed, you know, maybe even in different publications in print. And the answer this is really hard. There are some tools that go out there and try and sample it. It’s very difficult to do quite often this is done through manual sampling. So people will go and manually load pages just to see which companies ads appear. And if you do that on a frequent and regular basis, you’ll then get a profile of which ads are running and which ads aren’t. Don’t forget, it’s always important if you do this, then you think about things like time of day as well, and split your analysis across different times of day. But we can see here, you know, for example, electronics weekly, they’re running a house ad for their women electronics Awards, which is the wallpaper ad behind and then one of our clients, Tria, is making a real splash by taking over the homepage. And their their bright color scheme is definitely making impact, making those ads really jump out. So although it’s very low tech and it’s very straightforward, it’s certainly something worth doing, and it gives you an idea not only necessarily feel direct competitors, but also companies in the market as well.

So it might give you some ideas that perhaps are more easy to steal because they’re not from a direct competitor. We aim to get these conversations complete. So sorry, these webinars complete in about half an hour. So we’re nearly there just a last slide to talk about other ways to spy on competitors. So, you know, one of the things you can do is, obviously use media monitoring services that will give you information on PR and social media. So meltwater, I think, is probably the most popular that I see in the electronics industry, although decision is very good, but it’s a great way to see, you know, what companies are promoting. If you want to spy on direct marketing, you really to get on the database. It’s, you know, quite hard to make sure you get a large percentage, because segmentation means that you almost certainly won’t get all of the direct marketing communications. But we’ve done some studies in the past where we’ve signed up to a bunch of companies, you know, content offers. So you basically sign up to download a PDF, and then some companies ignore you. And you look at that, you think, this is kind of crazy, you know, I’ve shown the intent. There’s nothing happens. Other companies can be really, really effective, and they will start sending you really thoughtful nurturing campaigns, and maybe even contact you outside of where we are in the B to B tech market. So if we look at the IT sector, there are companies that will actually pick the phone up to you within 15 minutes of you registering on a website. So looking at what other industries are able to do in terms of really fast contact is always, you know, both a little bit challenging but also inspiring in terms of what we can do in the B to B tech sector. Trade Shows are an easy place to competitors. Frankly, the information is pretty limited because all of it is public, so it’s hard to get, real great insights. And lastly, there’s a whole bunch of really simple tools that are worth doing, so that’s from just following competitors on social media, through Google Alerts, Google News searches, searching on social media, and particularly searching on YouTube or subscribing to YouTube channels, all really useful ways to get information on competitors. Don’t underrate them. It’s always cool to see what somebody’s doing, and they think that’s, you know, kind of secret on the ad campaigns, but it’s not. But actually, some of the more simple stuff works really well.

So in terms of the takeaways, I mean, there’s lots of ways to spy on competitors and indeed, on partners, something I’ve not mentioned before. But it may be the case that if you’re working with, say, a distribution partner who is promoting not only your products, but some of your competitor products, very typical, for example, in electronics, you might want to see how much effort that distribution partner is putting into your products versus your competitors. To see if you’re getting a fair share of voice, you can certainly get lots of useful information ideas. I mean, it’s, I’ve got a picture of span our ballet. Those people who are fame, you know, who are familiar with the New Romantics of the 1980s will realize that this refers to the gold of the data, but definitely getting information ideas is really good idea, a really good approach. Ad transparencies helped, particularly the EU regulation, but it really only shows you what is being run. It doesn’t give you a lot of accurate data, even the tools that claim to give pricing and volume data on Google ads, they’re not accurate in niche markets, like the ones that we’re typically in. And then the last thing to say is, you know, whilst this is all good, it’s all very interesting, it can certainly help you build better campaigns. Don’t obsess over it. Don’t become a stalker, because that always ends badly. Have a fairly healthy relationship with looking at your competitors and then also spending time thinking about what your company does and making sure you’re differentiating and not just following.

So thank you very much for listening. A quick plug for our next webinar. Our next webinar is going to be about the Napier digital advertising playbook. I could assure the Europeans listening on the call who know me that I’ve not become American, but we do have a number of American clients, and for them, what we do is we actually build playbooks how we run campaigns, and quite often, where we work with an international client, we might build the first campaign in for example, it could be America or any other country, and then we’ll build a playbook that shows local offices how they can take the materials and implement the campaign themselves. So we build real playbooks for clients that help them run campaigns. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to show you some of the playbooks, sorry, some of the plays that we do for our clients. So we’re going to talk about exactly what we do to make things work really effectively, whether it be on LinkedIn or PR or anything else. So definitely sign up for that if you haven’t already, get your phone out and scan the QR code and register, and obviously, if you can’t make it register anyway, because we will tell you about the rebroadcast so there’ll be an on demand rebroadcast version. Thanks again for listening. We’ll now go and see if there’s any questions. I’m interested to know. If anybody’s got any questions, let me just have a quick look. I don’t have anything particular at the moment, so if anybody has anything to ask, please let me know. Just give you a couple of seconds to type.

Okay, we’ve we’ve got something here. So there’s a question from somebody who’s obviously a very experienced marketer. They’re asking about research on things like print, and they’re absolutely right. There used to be reports where companies literally went into print publications and they looked at who was running ads, and they estimated ad spend and share a voice and things like that from print publications. I guess, not surprisingly, those days are long gone. Those reports simply don’t sell. People can’t make money out of them. We have, however, run one off custom projects for clients where we’ve targeted particular markets or particular groups of trade publications and looked at print coverage. It has been a little while, to be fair, since people have cared about what others are doing in print, but it’s certainly something we can do, as well as doing the sampling of the online display ads on trade media, where, again, we’re getting an estimate of what, who’s spending, what and what they’re talking about. So they’re key messages. Well, I hope that’s interesting for you. I think you know, just to summarize, it’s not difficult to get the data and look at what your competitors are doing, it is quite difficult to get the insights.

So one thing I would urge everyone to do is, if you’re interested in finding out what your competitors are doing and getting some analysis on what that means, please do feel free to get in contact with us. My email. Is on the screen at the moment, and we’d be more than happy to talk about building out a small project where we do some research and then give you the insights about what we think it means, so what we think your competitors are doing, and how we think you could best counteract it. So do feel free to talk to us about that. I hope see you in October for the next webinar. If anyone does have any questions they think about after the event, please email me. Mike at Napier, B to b.com. Thank you very much for your time. I hope you found it useful. Thank you.