The Search Monitor™ Overview

Learn how The Search Monitor’s Competitive Advertising Tracking Empowers You to Own and Protect Your Market Landscape.

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Monitored Media: SEM (PPC and PLA ads), SEO, Shopping Engines, & Display Ads on Mobile & Desktop
Vast Footprint: Worldwide, 9+ search engines, 150,000+ publishers, & thousands of mobile apps. See list
Frequent Monitoring & Alerts: Hourly crawling & real-time report updates
Data Access: Web reports, excel export, excel plugin, API, or FTP. Schedule reports & email them to anyone!
Search Marketing Visibility Score: Industry’s first holistic view of a company’s search presence. Learn More

Competitive Ad Tracking Cross-Media Intelligence

One platform provides competitive ad tracking intelligence on Paid & Organic Search, Shopping, & Display:

Paid Search: See KPIs such as market share, rank, ad spend, clicks, CTR, & CPC across all search engines. Includes remarketing
Organic Search: Get rank and listing copy for universal search results including local, organic, news, shopping, and more.
Shopping: View competitors ads, seller ratings & reviews, keywords, prices, page rank, and SOV, for both PLAs and shopping engines.
Display & In-App Mobile: Find out where competitors’ ads are running, top-performing creatives, and publisher performance with Display Monitoring.
Paid, Organic & PLA Together: Analyze performance across paid, organic, and PLA shopping search results in the same report.
Compliance & Ad Intelligence Together: Get ad intelligence and compliance monitoring together in one platform!
Search Marketing Visibility Score: Grade your total-page search presence & get insights into where to spend next dollar.

Competitive Ad Tracking – Benchmarking

Get benchmarking stats to gauge your competitive ad performance:

Share of Voice: See how you compare against other advertisers and trend your SOV over time.
Ad Creatives: Learn from our database of ad copy that is ranked by popularity and searchable by keywords and brand names.
Market Landscape: Uncover all competitors in the market landscape, ranked by market reach and SOV across media.
Ad Spend, CTR, & Clicks: Make better decisions using precise paid search statistics. Learn more.

Business Development & Sales Tool

Get smarter about prospecting using competitive monitoring:

Prospecting: Find prospects specific to the verticals that you service who are the best size for your business.
Lead Scoring: Use competitive intelligence to score and rank your leads by ad spend, traffic volume & media channels used.
Vendor & Partner Identification: Learn which ad tracking vendors and affiliate programs your prospects already use. Track and get notified when vendors are switched or trialed in real time.
Presentations: Create pitch decks that include the actual tactics used by your prospects and comparisons against competitors and your own proven track record.
Search Remarketing: Contact people using Google’s RLSA

Media Planning & Strategy

Uncover answers with unprecedented visibility into the behavior of the market landscape. Use this knowledge to hone your media strategy.

Find out answers like:

Why Did My CPC Increase? Find out if market changes impacted your cost per click.
Which Offer Types & Creatives Are Most Popular? Uncover competitors’ offers and creatives, sorted by the most effective.
How Do I Compare Against Similar Advertisers? Index yourself against others like you (e.g., similar size, industry).
Which Affiliates & Partners Compete with Me? See which of your affiliates are stealing clicks from you.
Which Affiliates & Partners Help Me? Learn which affiliates are symbiotic with you (e.g., help you cover more keywords and block out competitors.) Learn about Super Affiliate strategies.
Where Do My Competitors Advertise? See which media outlets, verticals, and keywords your competitors use. Dive deeper into how spending, traffic, and SOV is allocated across paid & organic search, shopping, & display.

Lighthouse

is a vertical library of historical paid & organic search data.

Key ad tracking features include:

1,200+ Verticals: View paid & organic search data grouped by vertical. See full list of verticals.
Spend & Click Metrics: Get paid search statistics for Google and Bing on ad spend, CPC, clicks & CTR.
Vertical Indexes: Develop indexes across verticals of top advertisers to benchmark market reach, spend, clicks, & CPC.
Historical Data: Get historical data starting in July 2013.
Ad Spend Accuracy. Lighthouse ad spend data is a highly precise predictor of ad spend. Stats are computed using a mixture of real-time monitored data, click data, and search engine computations. Learn about our precision data.

Learn more about industry ad tracking.

Technology & Customizable Reports

We optimize intelligence & compliance using our SmartCrawler™ technology which adapts to the market as it evolves:

Randomized Crawling: Crawl the competition using random times, keywords, and geographies.
Geo-Control: Configure crawlers to focus on specific countries, languages, regions and/or cities. Geo-control is important if your business has a local focus like telecom or travel.
Vast Footprint: Monitor worldwide and in native languages across 9+ search engines, 150K publishers, & thousands of apps.
Volume Capabilities: Ad tracking available from one to 1 million keywords.
High Frequency: Monitor hourly, with real-time report updates. Learn about our precision data.
Auto-ID Affiliates: Automatically detect the affiliate networks and IDs of each partner and determine who is in your affiliate program.
Custom Reporting: Customize reports on the fly to meet your needs at any given moment.
Competitor Labels: Group and label unlimited competitors or partners for easy filtering and comparing.
Report Access: Easily access data via web reports & charts, API, excel export, scheduled email alerts, FTP, or excel query plug-in.

Can We Show You Our Ad Tracking Data?

Give us a set of keywords, a competitor’s website, or one of our 1,239 verticals, we’ll show what we monitor.

Request a Demo

Competitive Monitoring Support

We’re here for you when you need help with the tools or data:

Take advantage of set-up resources when you first begin
Access our Ad Tracking Help Center including how-to videos, FAQs, and other training materials
Contact us via phone, email or live chat

FAQs

What Is Competitive Advertising Tracking, and Why Is It Important?

Competitive ad tracking involves monitoring and analyzing your competitors’ advertising strategies. It helps businesses understand competitor ad placements, keywords, budgets, and strategy. By tracking competitors’ ads, companies can optimize their campaigns, discover new opportunities, and stay ahead.

How Can Competitive Ad Tracking Improve My Marketing Strategy?

Competitive ad tracking provides valuable insights into what works for your competitors, enabling you to refine your campaigns. By understanding competitor strategies, you can adjust your ad messaging, bidding strategies, and targeting to better resonate with your audience, increase ROI, and gain a competitive edge.

What Key Metrics Should I Monitor In Competitive Ad Tracking?

Important metrics to monitor include ad spend, keywords, ad copy, ad placement (search or display), impressions, click-through rates (CTR), and conversion rates. Tracking these metrics helps you understand the effectiveness of competitors’ ads and identify areas for improvement in your campaigns.

Which Industries Benefit the Most From Competitive Ad Tracking Tools?

Competitive ad tracking tools are particularly beneficial for industries with high competition, such as retail, e-commerce, technology, automotive, finance, and healthcare. Staying on top of competitors’ advertising strategies is essential to maintaining a competitive advantage and driving market share in these industries.

How Do I Choose the Right Competitive Advertising Tracking Solution for My Business?

When selecting a competitive ad tracking solution, consider factors like ease of use, the range of data covered (such as ad platforms and competitor types), pricing, and the depth of insights provided. Look for tools that allow for customizable tracking, provide real-time data, and integrate with your existing marketing stack for the most effective strategy planning.