Finding out What Your Competitor Revenue & Spends on AdWords and Transactions

Companies with a similar stock of goods tend to spend about the same amount on advertising and SEO. Did you know there is a way to find out how much your competitor earns and spends on their business on average?

By following the steps below, you can learn about another company’s spending habits and how business is going for them overall.

Step 1: Determine the amount of traffic they get.

Finding out the number of monthly visitors your competitor gets can be done by choosing a website you select randomly and plugging it into an online tool called Similar Web’s Chrome Extension, which looks up the traffic on a particular site. You can read more about the website on Similar Web. For the purposes of this example, we will check to see the traffic on sunglasses-shop.co.uk.

Since this store sells sunglasses, keep in mind that there will be seasonal peaks in the summer due to the nature of the product sold.

That said, the traffic on the site ranges from 521 000 in July to 156 000 in November. There is a bit of an increase in December which isn’t surprising given that this store also sells goggles. So on average, the site gets close to 339,000 visits per month. We’ll continue using this store as an example of continuity.

Step 2: Look at the sales performance

The next thing you will need to do is determine the number of sales your competitor has. This can be done by looking at the website’s sequential order numbers, which almost all e-commerce websites have.

1. a) Place an order on the website. The order number generated reflects the number of orders has been made. For example, if the order number you get is 002345, that means your order is the 2345^th sale on the website.
2. b) After a week has gone by, place another order and note the order number again. So, if this time the order number you get is 2502, you can calculate how many sales were made per week on average by subtracting 2345 from 2502, which is 157.
3. c) Once you have this number, you can determine how many orders were placed each month by multiplying 157 by 4 = 628.

Keep in mind that some orders are not processed completely. Some shoppers may not proceed to pay for items they have placed in their cart, and some items may be returned. There is no way of determining with certainty how many of these sales were not completed or returned, but the number usually does not exceed 10 percent of sales.

Ten percent of 157 is approximately 15 per week or 62 per month. Now that we know this number, we can subtract it from the monthly total and get an estimate of 566 orders per month. We have now determined that the website in question receives 566 orders per month and 339,000 visitors per month.

Step 3: Get a rough idea of your competitor’s income

You will need to determine how much your competitor sells their product for. In our example of sunglasses, we can guess that they cost an average of $150 each. So, 566 x $150 = $84,900. You can conclude that your competitor does roughly $84,900 worth of sales per month.

Step 4: Determine your competitor’s advertising budget

This part may take some time and patience to figure out, but it is fairly simple. To find out how much the company spends on AdWords each month enter the domain into Serpstat’s (or Ahrefs, Semrush) search bar. Then, proceed to “PPC Research” and click on “Keywords.” This will show all the keywords the domain you entered bids on.

Once you have this list, export it to a spreadsheet, preferably. You can choose either Excel or Google Spreadsheets.

When you have exported the list, you will see that there are many different columns. We won’t need them all. The ones we want to focus on are:

• Position (written as “Pos”)
• The number of queries
• CPC (cost per click)

You can leave the columns with the domain if you would like. That way you will know which domain you are dealing with. When you delete the irrelevant columns, your sheet should look like this:

Now, to determine your competitor’s budget we will use the CTR. The position of the ad affects the CTR – the higher the position of the ad, the better the CTR will be, and vice versa. Using a CTR position table, we can determine the following:

You will need to add these numbers to your spreadsheet to be able to do the calculation. Count the budget for each keyword using this formula:

Budget = CPC* number of queries* CTR by position

Then, to find out what the total budget adds the budgets of all the keywords on your spreadsheet:

Now, we know that the budget for the domain in question was $13,000. This is approximately 13 percent of the website’s revenue. You can now compare your competitor’s numbers to you to see how your business measures up.

Harper Harrison

Harper Harrison is a reporter for The Hear UP. Harper got an internship at the NPR and worked as a reporter and producer. harper has also worked as a reporter for the Medium. Harper covers health and science for The Hear UP.