• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 27, 2016

It's not something we talked about way back when I worked in marketing. We called it spying -- the ability to learn competitive information and use it to your advantage. Now companies are building platforms that look into one another's online campaigns and calling it gaining local insight. I guess it levels the bidding field.

Kantar Media's search marketing intelligence company AdGooroo launched Local Insight Tuesday to give advertisers a view into the types of paid search campaigns competitors run in local markets.

The platform provides insight into campaigns running in 55 U.S. cities. Some of the data includes identifying their competitors and viewing their strategies and performance.

Marketers also can check on competitors' budgets, traffic and click-through rate estimates, impressions, as well as keyword bids, ad copy, ad position, and landing pages.

eMarketer estimates that marketers will spend $29.24 billion on search ads in 2016, of which $18.54 billion will belong to mobile. In 2017, U.S. search ad spend will rise to $32.32 billion, of which $22.18 billion will belong to mobile.

I cannot understand the extensive requirements to track competitors' campaigns, especially without an automation tool. For companies that market across multiple regions, understanding paid-search advertising competition and campaign performance in each market can become a lengthy and difficult process because of the sheer volume of information and the lack of a viable means to adequately measure the data. 

“While other geotargeted search intelligence solutions provide only one or two data points at the local level, AdGooroo’s Local Insight offers a broad range of data to help advertisers gain a complete picture of the search landscape in each market and make more informed decisions,” explains AdGooroo founder and CEO Richard Stokes in a prepared statement.