Google Ads Competitor Analysis: a Service With Zero Practical Value

Honestly, clients don’t love asking for competitor analysis nearly as much as agencies love pushing it as a separate service. Or as part of one: “analysis of competitors’ PPC behavior.” It sounds solid, looks like work, and fits neatly into a proposal as its own line item.

Contents

1. Public visibility tells you nothing about performance
2. Household chemicals case
3. What about a competitor’s keywords?
4. “But their prices are lower”
5. Where did this nonsense even come from
6. Where there’s at least some sense in it
7. When it’s worth looking at a competitor at all
8. What to do instead of competitor analysis
9. The bottom line
10. FAQ

Looking at Competitors in Search Results for Inspiration: Google Ads Ad Formats

The problem is that 95% of what hides behind it is just a look at someone else’s storefront. With no idea what’s in the cash register.

Public visibility tells you nothing about performance

Key point: if a competitor shows up for your keywords, it doesn’t mean their ads pay off. It means exactly one thing: the competitor is doing it. That’s it.

Compare it to a brick-and-mortar store. We see a shop window with products in it. Does that mean there’s strong demand? Definitely not. Maybe the owner overordered and needs to clear stock. Maybe it’s close to expiring. Or maybe the owner just doesn’t understand what to sell.

Same with ads. You see a competitor’s ads, their banners, their messaging, and conclude: “if it’s showing, it must be working.” In reality you don’t even know whether they have conversion tracking set up. Or whether they’ve been burning money for the third month in a row because they never look at the account and the contractor keeps quiet while the invoices get paid.

These aren’t isolated cases. In every other audit I run I see the same picture, especially with contractors: the client has been unhappy with results for months, and not a single change has been made in the account in that time. My YouTube channel has dozens of these audits, so you can see for yourself.

Household chemicals case

I was auditing a household chemicals manufacturer. I didn’t have CRM access yet, but the account alone told me the ads were losing money. Over the years I’ve learned to work out numbers even where I can’t see them: after hundreds of projects I can estimate a business’s margin, break-even point and what it pays contractors, give or take. I can calculate ROMI even without direct access to the financials.

I tell the owner: let me look at the CRM so I can confirm it 100%. He gives me access, and I see that a very well-known agency had been running the ads and had kept them at a straight loss for six months. And that’s before counting the agency’s own fees.

I put together a proposal. The owner says he needs to talk it over with the head of that business line, who’s afraid things will get worse, so they’re not ready yet. I tell him: man, you’ve been running at a loss for six months. How much worse can it get? The ads are running, they look respectable, maybe some competitor is even keeping an eye on them, and it’s still a loss.

Key point: treating a competitor as a source of performance data is methodologically meaningless. Without access to their Google Ads account you don’t have a single number: no conversion rate, no cost per conversion, no real ad spend. You’re not discussing facts, you’re discussing a hypothetical. That’s not analysis, it’s reading tea leaves with a pretty PDF deck.

What about a competitor’s keywords?

Same story. You see that a competitor shows for a query, and so what? All you actually know is that the ad was shown. You don’t know their bid, their ad position, their impression share, and most importantly, whether they even make a profit on that query.

Google Ads on Competitor Brand Names: When It’s Worth It (and When It’s Not)

Key point: copying a competitor’s keyword list means copying their potential mistake, which now becomes yours. It only makes sense when you have access to their account, it has end-to-end analytics set up, and you can see which keyword clusters actually bring results.

“But their prices are lower”

This is where the most damage happens. The client is told: we did the analysis, the competitor is 20% cheaper. And what is the client supposed to do with that? Cut prices by 20%? What if those 20% are the client’s entire margin?

An observation that isn’t tied to what the business can actually afford isn’t an insight. It’s just an excuse to make a worse product while staring at someone else’s screen.

Where did this nonsense even come from

From SEO. There, competitor analysis is an established practice, and at least partly justified: Ahrefs or Serpstat show a competitor’s rankings, the number and quality of backlinks, and estimated traffic per page. The data isn’t perfect, traffic estimates are often off, and that’s easy to check against real analytics. But at least these are semi-objective proxy metrics collected by an independent tool.

Google Ads isn’t SEO. There’s no position you hold for years thanks to content and links. Auctions are recalculated in real time for every impression, and the outcome depends on the bid, ad quality and budget. No external tool sees any of that. There’s no independent source that could evaluate someone else’s ad campaign the way Ahrefs evaluates an organic ranking. You can see that an ad was shown, and that’s all.

Key point: you can’t pull performance metrics for someone else’s ads, and not because nobody has built a good enough tool. It’s because an ad account is private data that doesn’t exist in the public space in any form. “Do me a Google Ads competitor analysis the same way you do it for SEO” is a false equivalence. Similar words, completely different nature of data.

Where there’s at least some sense in it

The only data source you can lean on even a little is Auction Insights in your own account. But no illusions here either. It only shows the auctions you took part in yourself. If your budget is 200 UAH ($4.4) and the market potential is 10,000 UAH ($222), the picture is so incomplete that you can’t draw any conclusions from it.

What you can actually see:

• the real number of competitors you’re up against in a given segment;
• trends, if you build a custom report rather than the standard one;
• hypotheses about why things changed: if the number of competitors and the trends have been stable for the last few weeks but cost per click is going up, someone changed their bids or strategy, or Google simply re-indexed prices.

This kind of analysis is extremely superficial, and you can’t use it as a basis for decisions.

When it’s worth looking at a competitor at all

Not their banners, not their keywords, not their strategies. Sometimes, browsing competitors, you can pick up insights on their website: in product pages, in their USP. Even then the usual question applies: you don’t build your own USP based on how a competitor does it. You have your own business and your own marketing, assuming you have any.

People often confuse marketing with advertising and try to build marketing through ads. It works exactly the other way around: marketing comes first, advertising follows from it. They teach that in the first year of Marketing 101.

Even if you imagine having access to all of a competitor’s metrics, and you see their contribution margin is 30% higher, what do you do with that? You can dig into the reasons: cheaper ads thanks to a well-known brand, different unit economics. But that only gives you a surface-level picture; you can’t draw a direct correlation to how you should set up your own ads.

What to do instead of competitor analysis

Key point: strategy and messaging should be built from the client’s business: its margins, resources, real USP, positioning and vision. Not from someone else’s account that you’ll never even get to look inside.

You can use the Ads Transparency Center to see which ads a competitor runs and on which networks. So what? All you’ll see is that the ads are running. If the competitor builds messaging from their own marketing, that approach won’t fit you; it’s their positioning and their vision. Think a headline “Order the service now” instead of “Order the service” is a game changer? You’re deeply mistaken.

Simply copying a competitor’s campaign structure can serve as an initial hypothesis, but nothing more. I’ve seen many times how a direct copy of a structure just doesn’t work, and the campaign has to be rebuilt anyway, because there are too many variables outside the ad account and beyond our understanding.

The bottom line

Google Ads competitor analysis only makes sense in two narrow forms: Auction Insights as a diagnostic of auction pressure, and looking for messages the market hasn’t covered yet for positioning. Everything else, “they’re cheaper,” “their banner is cooler,” “they bid on these keywords,” is total nonsense passed off as work because it’s easy to sell to a client who doesn’t know there are zero real numbers behind it.

And separately, it’s important not to confuse marketing competitor analysis with Google Ads competitor analysis. Marketing competitor analysis definitely makes sense. But that’s a whole different story.