The online advertising front has changed drastically in the past 5 years with new and developing platforms such as coupon deal sites, new blogs being born every day, e-commerce websites, Yelp, Google Adwords, etc. offering several advertising avenues. In this sea of the world wide web, it seems overwhelming to keep tabs on your competitors’ strategies and gauge their success rates. Who are they advertising with? Did their latest advertising campaign perform that well? How big is their advertising budget? Frankly, it would take the work of Sherlock Holmes to research and find every platform your competitors are using to reach out to customers. Well not to worry my dear Watson, there are some easy ways to track your competitors ad sensibilities and success rates without employing much more than your finger tips and a keyboard. Why, it’s almost elementary! Below are three simple steps you can take to monitor your competition and learn from their mistakes and successes: ONE: Sign up for a free beginner account with MixRank, a leading spy tool for text and display ads. Just enter your competitor’s website, a key advertising word/phrase associated with their company or product, or a major advertisers and publishers to begin. In seconds, you’ll have a list of your competitor’s top active ad links, a record of their ad reach, rates from the best performing ads, a link list of their ad publishers, and a listing of both text and display ads. [quote]Tip: Take a look at both their text ads and display ad details. Knowing which type of ad and which ad design has been more successful can help you create more engaging advertising content and be one step ahead of your competition.[/quote]TWO: Check out your competitor’s keywords and how often those specific words or phrases are being sought out by customers using GoogleAds Keyword Tool. For instance, we use a similar service when looking at our competition via a keyword search like: “Orlando marketing and ad agency.” You can see which keywords rank on the hierarchy and drive traffic results as well as the words may be viewed as negative or non applicable. We always discover more about what the customer is searching for and if our competition is incorporating these keywords in their advertising campaigns. [quote]Tip:Use this competitor information to find out what keywords you should be incorporating in your ad and website content to help boost your chances of customers finding you first. [/quote]THREE: Become the 007 of advertising and join SpyFu. This web service offers a host of benefits and “spyware” to compare domains, discover new keywords, find the best ad copy and check the quality and success of your own advertising campaigns. You’ll have access to top ads, domain-level numbers, and gain some insight on their SEO traffic and Adwords budget just by typing in your competitor’s company name or keywords. Tip: Stay ahead of the game and check out which publishers are boosting the success rates of their ads. These statistics can help guide you when choosing the right publishers to advertise with and give you a higher return on your advertising investment.Our Florida advertising agency hopes you have found these tips useful for your business. To learn how BIGEYE can help you track your competitors and make the most out of your digital campaign, click here to Think BIG!