The Daily Carnage

If you’re not using LinkedIn’s Competitor Analytics Dashboard to identify growth opportunities for your company pages, you’re missing out. Here’s how to get started:

1. Choose Competitors to Follow. Add your list of up to 9 relevant competitor businesses—at your level or beyond—to the dashboard.
2. Compare Audience Size and Growth Rate. Use follower metrics to quickly identify which competitor is growing fastest and where you fit in the mix.
3. Reverse-Engineer Page Growth. Do some digging to discover the driver behind a page’s growth by visiting the company page, scrolling its top-ranked posts, viewing its ads, and browsing its associated thought leaders.
4. Check Competitor Highlights. This panel shows two metrics: total posts and engagement rate, giving you a percentage for how you compared to competition.
5. Compare Organic Content Metrics. See how your company page compares to others in terms of reactions, comments, and reposts across time periods.
6. Review Competitor Content. Take note of the content on a competitor’s page, such as the type, post format, and call to action on their top posts. Read the comments for customer sentiment and company responses.
7. Chart Competitor Analytics Over Time. Export data from the dashboard to track and report on growth over an extended period of time.

For an in-depth guide to analyzing your competitors on LinkedIn, visit Social Media Examiner.

Whether you like it or not, some clients expect you to be part PPC hero, part business consultant. Here are 9 common questions your PPC clients have and how to answer them with confidence:

1. “What should our budget be?” Platform planning tools, like Google Keyword Planner, provide cost estimates that can serve as suggested ranges to start the conversation—but they’re not always realistic. Reverse engineer a budget based on your client’s target number of leads and CPL.
2. “Who should we be targeting?” … You tell me, right? Get as much information as you can from your client about their buyer personas and conduct target research on the ad channels to develop a multi-channel or cross-channel approach.
3. “Who are our competitors and how can we differentiate from them?” A client’s market competitor may not necessarily be their PPC competitor. Use Auction Insights to determine which domains are bidding against your client, as well as a keyword research tool to identify keywords to try or avoid.
4. “Should we focus on growing our customer base or servicing the customers we already have?” It depends. If you’re losing customers faster than you can make them, you should focus on retention. That said, you should be doing some prospecting no matter what.
5. “Should we expand into new geographic markets?” Maybe! If there is search volume and high enough target audiences to support it—and if shipping, timing, service, and production can keep up—let’s run a controlled test.
6. “Does it make sense to extend our product or service offerings?” With keyword and audience research and competitor analysis, PPC pros can help determine whether or not there is existing demand and if a client is prepared to compete with the cost and quality of competitors.
7. “Should we have a holiday sale this year or hold off?” Typically, holiday sales aren’t going to rake in the highest ROAS performance. Consider what your client’s goal is and confirm whether or not it’s realistically achievable with planning tools and historical performance.
8. “What areas of our company do you think are resonating well and what could be done to improve?” You can only answer this question from a campaign persective. Which ad copy, CTA, or keyword group sees the most engagement?
9. “What are some brands you engage with regularly and what do you like about them? How could those same practices apply to our company?” Scroll the Facebook and TikTok ad libraries for high-spend brands doing cool things and prepare some key takeaways.

Get the full scoop on PPC Q&As at WordStream.