Creating a Competitive PPC Campaign

Pay-per click campaigns can be compared to a chess game, each player can see the others move and strategically think a few moves ahead before eventually trying to get them into a check mate situation. With an effective PPC campaign, you can be the “other player” – the one who consistently thinks a few moves ahead and comes out on top.

This post will help you be the one who comes out on top by showing you how to be aware of exactly what your competitors are doing and come up with a strategy to earn your business more money than them.

What you need

1. Budget: For a competitive PPC campaign you’re going to need enough money to make sure that you’re on top on the right day of the week at the right time of day. It’s hard to tell you what budget you need, but the tips further down this post will help you figure out what sort of budget you want.
2. Time: PPC isn’t for people who don’t have the time to manage it. It’s not the sort of thing that you can set up and leave to run, it takes time monitoring the campaign and constantly fine-tuning it.
3. A Google Adwords account: These are really easy to set up, just visit the Google Adwords login page and press “Try Adwords Now”. This will help you to set up your own Adwords account. Please note that there is a set-up fee for each campaign.
4. A KeywordSpy account: For this post, I’m using the “Free Trial”, but visit the website and get a Free Trial account or sign up for one of the monthly packages. This will set you back around £50 per month ($89.95) but if you look at the potential return on investment, that’s very little in comparison.
5. Your chosen keywords: You should’ve used the Google Keyword Tool to find your chosen keywords. These will help you to find your competitors and give you a head start in the PPC campaign.

Finding your competitors and knowing what they’re spending money on

Finding out who your competitors are may seem like a small task, but it isn’t and it is not a one-off task, you need to consistently monitor your competitors to see if there are any new ones.

Remember those keywords you found? Do some Google searches and take a look at the sponsored listings. Open up a piece of software like Excel to make a list of your competitors. This is so you can easily add/remove these guys at a later date. You’ll need this list when using KeywordSpy, so make sure you take down their name and URL.

Now that you know who your competitors are, you can start to get sneaky. Head over to KeywordSpy and enter one of your competitors URLs in the search box at the top – remember to log in and make sure you have the right localisation set because the default is set to the United States. For our example we’re going to be using “Amazon”, who have one hell of a good PPC campaign going on.

When you press “search” you’re going to see just how powerful this software is. Ignore all that and press the “PPC Keywords” tab. With your free trial you’re only going to be able to see the top 20 results, with the paid account you can see pretty much all of the results (the accuracy may not be 100% due to caching etc).

Within this next table, the tab you should be most interested in is “ROI” (return on investment), what this does is rates the keyword on how likely it is that you’ll make a good ROI, from experience this is a very accurate figure so, whilst you shouldn’t rely solely on this factor, these are the keywords you should worry about. The great thing about this tool is the export features, there are three, the one on the far right allows you to export the entire campaign straight to your own Adsense account!

You obviously need to repeat this step with all of your domains, so don’t get too eager with the Google Adwords export feature. Remember this is about beating your competitors, not copying them. Export your results to a CSV instead, this way you can merge your results from multiple competitors and get a campaign that beats all of them.

Beating your competitors to the punch

This is what all of your work was really about. Open up your merged CSV file and compare your results, remember that what you really want to look at is Search Volume compared to ROI, sometimes these may not correlate – the reason for this is that some keywords have a very high click through rate even though their volume is so low – this is because they’re very specific, long-tail terms – so make sure you take that into account too.

What you want to avoid is wasting your budget like your competitors. A lot of your competitors will be spending a lot of money on keywords that they’re not making a good return on – you can do two things here. Either do some research into why they’re not making a good return OR just ignore it altogether. It’s always best to do a bit of research first, just head to the landing page and have a look around, if their page looks fine and should be converting well then this is a keyword to avoid – so delete it from your table.

Now that you’ve filtered out your spreadsheet, you can import it to your Google Adwords account and start setting budgets – if you have the budget available, always try and spend more money than your competitors. This almost guarantees that you’re going to be above them, just remember that some companies have budgets that may be much higher and sometimes it’s okay to take the second spot in the SERPs for the sake of saving a few pounds.

Now what?

So, you’ve not got a campaign that your competitors can envy – not only is it a campaign mimicking that of one competitor, it could be a combination of may competitors… but why stop here?

Here at Digital Online Marketing we don’t like to just mimick competitors, we like to be on the ball and do keyword research of our own, so use the aforementioned Google Keyword Tool to do some research into search volumes and budgets, compare these to results in KeywordSpy by using the same search technique as before but with the KEYWORD instead – to do this select the “Keywords” radio button, then when you’ve searched hit the “PPC Competitors” tab. From this area you’ll be able to select your potential competitors and see what sort of budget you need.

Conclusion

With some hard work and manual labour it really is possible to beat your competitors to the punch with an effective and strategic pay per click campaign. At first it may seem like a lot of work but with the calculations on ROI it’s more of a calculated risk than doing it alone.