How to Check Competitors' Google Ads Budget: A Practical Guide

Startups new to paid ads find themselves struggling with advertising budget confusion—How much to spend, how high is high enough, and how low is too low. 

Here is an important tip. Commit to a figure you can manage and allow 1 to 3 months for the ad platform to learn from your data and optimize your ads. That said, you may still be wondering what exact figures to start with. This is where analyzing your competitor’s Google Ads budget comes in. It gives you real numbers to work with.

However, given that Google does not provide this information publicly, your best bet is to consider reputable third-party tools. This article identifies 3 tools for checking competitors' Google Ads budget, with a step-by-step guide on how to use them.

Why monitor competitors' Google Ads budget?

You can monitor competitors' Google Ads budgets to get an idea of what to invest, especially if you’re just starting with paid ads. Here are other reasons.

• Gain a competitive advantage: It reveals gaps or where competitors are underinvesting. That allows you to see an area you can consider or, in some cases, take a multi-channel approach. 
• Inform your own budgeting decisions: Studying competitors' ad budgets can help you decide whether to increase, reduce or shift your budget to another campaign. For instance, provided your ads are relevant and eligible, you can decide to bid higher to get a better ad position than your competitors.
• Identify market trends and opportunities: You can also see possible changes in a competitor’s budget strategy that you can capitalize on. For instance, cost-per-click (CPC) may be higher during the shopping season. For instance, research shows that bid prices can jump by as much as 140% during the holidays compared to the rest of the year. So, if you start advertising 1 to 2 months earlier, it could be cheaper, and you can build awareness for your product. By the time shopping season comes around, you can then focus on retargeting your warm audiences. Learn more about increasing your holiday sales cost effectively here.

The goal of studying your competitor’s ad budget is not to do exactly what they’re doing. Rather, you want to identify gaps in their paid marketing strategy and fine-tune your ad copies, creatives, and budget strategy.

Tools and methods to estimate competitors' ad spend

The three tools in focus provide competitors' Google Ad budget estimates based on traffic and cost-per-click (CPC) data, as well as other available data. They are:

1. Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool
2. SEMrush (AdClarity and Advertising Research)
3. Similarweb (PPC Spend)

Comparison of tools to estimate competitor’s ad budget

Here is a snapshot of how the tools compare. Use this to select the best fit for your needs based on factors like pricing, data coverage and actionable insights.

If you're looking for an all-in-one solution for finding competitor ads, Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool is the best value for money. At an affordable price point, you get an extensive coverage of data and insights on your competitors' ad spend and creatives across all major ad platforms. Alternatively, you may also consider SEMRush or Similarweb but both require higher tiers to access similar data coverage and lack insights backed by experienced marketers.

1. Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool

Kaya’s Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool automates your competitor ad analysis, revealing the advertising spend of your competitors and how much effort they're committing to each channel. It shows you the monthly budget, search volume, cost per click, competitors bidding on the same keyword, competitor with the highest budget, etc.

Check competitor ad’s budget using Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool

You can find your competitor’s ad budget insights in only 3 steps using Kaya, as follows:

Step 1: Provide your competitor's website links.

Step 2: Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence tool gathers the data and analyzes them.

Step 3: You receive actionable insights on competitor's ad spend and effort per channel.

Benefits of using Kaya for competitor analysis

Kaya is built to simplify and support your decision-making in the following ways.

• It shows you all competitor’s Google Ads data in one place.
• It allows you to check Google Ads data of up to 10 competitors at once.
• It reveals what your competitors are spending and effort for each channel, including paid social channels like Meta Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
• It offers recommendations on the channels you should focus on and how much budget you should commit based on your campaign goals.

Kaya goes beyond showing you just the numbers. It offers expert advice and support from its experienced marketers, including a complementary 30-minute consultation call to help you make better sense of the data. Get free access to insights to outpace your competitors. 

2. SEMrush

Semrush is an all-in-one digital marketing software with tools for SEO, pay-per-click (PPC), social media, and content marketing. It offers several PPC tools such as Ads Launch Assistant, PPC Keyword Tool, PLA Research, Ad Tracking, etc. Semrush also allows you to check competitors’ Google Ads budgets using two tools.

Check competitors' Google Ads budget using AdClarity

AdClarity is an ad intelligence app developed by Biscience Ltd and integrated into the SEMrush app center. It estimates any advertiser’s ad spend on Google display ads, social ads, or YouTube video ads. 

AdClarity allows you to search for data by publisher, advertiser, campaigns, keywords, groups or comparisons. To start, you will need the display ad subscription, which costs $169 per month.

How to estimate competitor ad’s budget using AdClarity

Step 1: AdClarity is available to anyone with a Semrush account. Create a Semrush account, then opt for an AdClarity display ad subscription.

‍Step 2: Set up your user settings. To do that, go to the top-right corner of the app interface and click on user settings. This allows you to set a default currency and if you want widgets to display numbers or percentages.

Step 3: Click the search bar at the top of the app interface and enter relevant search terms. You can search by competitor's name, campaign titles or other keywords. You can also narrow your search by time frame, location, or device you'd want to focus on.

After you search, AdClarity reveals a range of competitor budget data, such as:

• Estimated expenditure
• Advertiser expenditure trends
• Top ads, top campaigns, top publishers
• Ad buying methods
• Top ad by impressions

Step 4: Click on ‘Ad buying methods’ to see every ad delivery method and how much was spent on each for the timeframe you selected. Add these numbers to get an estimate of your competitor's Google display ad spending.

Checking competitors' Google Ads budget using Advertising Research

Advertising Research is a Semrush tool for analyzing your closest paid search competitors. It shows your competitors' ad budgets and copies, desktop and mobile keywords they are bidding on, emotional triggers used in their ad copy, etc. 

It can also estimate any PPC advertiser’s spending on Google Search Ads based on the keywords their ads rank for. You can access Advertising Research with any Semrush free trial or paid subscription. So, to use this, you can go with the Pro plan at $139.95 per month.

How to estimate competitor Google ad’s budget using Advertising Research

Step 1: Sign up for a Semrush account and subscribe to any paid plan. For instance, you can start with the pro plan or opt for the 7-day free trial.

Step 2: Enter the domain of your competitor. Click on ‘search’ and wait for the report to load. The page will load your competitor's details, such as keywords, traffic, traffic cost, paid search trends, paid search positions, etc.

Step 3: Click on ‘Traffic cost.’ The 'traffic cost' is an estimate of your competitor's monthly cost to rank for the listed keywords in Google Ads. SEMrush estimates this data based on cost-per-click (CPC) and position.

With the estimated figures, you can then compare them against your Google Ads campaign budget. 

Note: You can only see the current month’s ad spending estimate when using the Pro plan. You will need the Guru or Business plan to get historical figures of up to 12 months. 

3. Similarweb

Similarweb is a software that gives users behind-the-scenes analytics for every website online. 

Similarweb's 'PPC Spend' insights offer an estimate of competitor spending on PPC search terms over the analyzed period. It also reveals your competitor's estimated ad spend and evaluates their potential budgets. Its PPC Spend calculation is based on three data points: 

• Paid search visits per website per country
• Paid keywords per website per country
• CPC per country

Check competitors' Google Ads budget using PPC Spend

Here are the steps to spy on your competitor’s Google ad budget using Similarweb’s PPC Spend.

Step 1: Sign up for Similarweb and subscribe to any of your preferred plans.

Step 2: Navigate to the 'Competitive Research’ module.

Step 3: Go to the 'Website Analysis' section, and click on ‘Paid Search'.

Similarweb’s PPC Spend allows you to sort your report by device so you can view your competitor’s ad budget estimates based on devices or combined total traffic. So, what can you do with this data and insight?

How to use the data

The goal of analyzing your competitor’s Google ad budget is not to simply follow what they do. Rather, you want to use their figures as a guide to evaluate your investment per channel or adjust your ad spending. Here are ways to use the data.

• Focus on relative values and trends: Competitors' ad budget data are estimates. So, instead of focusing on the actual figures, suggest to focus on trends, like month-on-month changes, and seasonal fluctuations, as well as the relative values between competitors. 
• Use insight to adjust your budget spending: You can use insights to plan for seasonality, bidding early to get lower CPC and using retargeting afterward. You can also use the estimates to adjust your spending on different ad channels, like paid social channels, including Meta Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
• Insights can reveal where you should invest: Other tools show you your competitor’s ad budget, from which you then manually decide where to invest. However, Kaya’s Competitor Ad intelligence tool goes the extra mile by offering channel and budget spending recommendations.
• Use as a foundation to get expert human support: Get more support from an experienced marketing team to make sense of the data and develop a winning strategy. Kaya’s team gives you a deeper interpretation of your data, enabling you to make the right decisions.