Campaign Optimization: Take a Look at Your Neighbor

A lot of our advertisers call in or email us to determine what they can do to help generate more profitable traffic. We do our best to provide suggestions in terms of our features and keywords. Lately, I have started to reiterate the notion that an advertiser should be mindful of his competition and what they are doing. Unfortunately, our advertisers are not on an island. They are one of many advertisers in a crowded field. There are experienced advertisers, major companies who are aggressive with large budgets and fledgling advertisers who are dipping their toes into the pool. Each website may have different landing pages, ad copy, offers, and all the bells and whistles one can imagine. They may be using multiple ads, campaign scheduling, multiple bidding strategies, custom keyword ad descriptions, and analytics to track all of their activity. All of these factors are what advertisers do to differentiate themselves from others.

I have tried to reinforce the idea that an advertiser should do his best to be unique in his particular field. I like to think of it as walking in a mall. You have a shop that sells a particular set of items, and there may be several other places within this mall that offers the same or similar products. How do you stick out? What do you do to separate yourself from the others? I would take a look around to see what those owners are doing that I am not, and find out if it is working for them.

I recently read a great post on SearchEngineLand.com by Matt Van Wagner where he discusses the ways an advertiser in PPC can examine their competition. (Be sure, however, to take the title with a grain of salt.) In his article, “Tips for Spying on Your PPC Competitors,” Mr. Van Wagner does an amazing job breaking down the benchmarks an advertiser can use to determine what competitors are doing, how they are doing it, and how you can improve your results. He refers to this method as “PPC competitive intelligence.” That is exactly what this exercise is: you are gathering intelligence on your surroundings in order to affect your needs and goals.

Matt breaks this down in 3 tenets: Benchmarking/forecasting, tracking day-to-day tactics, and forensics. Benchmarking is to determine through data analysis the amount of investment that your competition is committing so as to determine your response. This is done through outside research within your field. Day-to-day tactics includes the data tracking of changing bids, ad changes, and new landing pages. This is to help you improve your response time to such changes. Forensics is monitoring if your competition is operating within industry rules and guidelines, so they are not breaking the rules of trademark infringement and the copying and stealing of ad copy.

Matt also goes on to encourage his readers to study their competition. That includes checking their ads, landing pages, their daily spend, their choice of keywords, and the amount of changes made during their campaigns. He also touches on the outside tools that you can use to collect data, as well as the “ethical considerations” in PPC advertising. Matt discusses the practice of click fraud and its prevalence in the market.

I found the above tips to be truly helpful, because they reinforces the concept that you can make more informed choices when you have the data to support it. Our advertisers should understand that they can affect their results by collecting data and adapting to change.

 7Search has a tool that allows you to do that very thing. In fact, twice this week I have shown advertisers how to use this tool, and the benefits of its use. This is our Bidding By tool which allows an advertiser to see who his competition is by keyword. You can find this in the image below:

By clicking on the icon, a dialog box will appear.

This shows the other websites and advertisers that are bidding on that particular keyword. This includes their current bid, their current rank for that keyword, and their current Default Ad Description. You can then copy the URL and paste it into a fresh browser to examine their current set up. This is where you can see what their offers are, their ad copy, their website design, etc. You would then use this tool to periodically check in on what your competition is doing to build their business.

Another tool to help you examine your competition is our search engine. Implant any keyword that you are bidding on, and the results page that appears will show you which URLs are bidding on that keyword, and their creative choices. This is available on our home page. Look for our search box at the top of the page.

All of this is one more tactic you can use to help improve your results. Just like any other business, it is important to be unique and attractive in some way. You can’t determine that without knowing what your fellow marketers are doing. Take some time to do research on your field. Adding this to your daily tasks can make a positive impact on your results in the long term.