Mistake #5: Lack of competition information
It’s important to know your market reach and effectiveness in relation to other advertisers in the same industry.
Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself:
- What keywords are they using?
- How often are my ads served compared to my competitors?
- How much is their keywords’ cost per click (CPC) ?
- What are their winning ad copies?
- What is their working keyword ad copy landing page strategy?
For the keywords that are important to you it is crucial for you to guard them closely. Most businesses know the importance of competitive intelligence, but only a few put it into practice.
The reason is because there is a lot of manual labor involved in the data collection process and then putting that data into an actionable report.
Solution:
iSpionage’s PPC Competitive Intelligence allows you get insight into your competitors’ campaigns.
It automatically gathers the information on daily basis and puts it into a simple web interface that will allow you to:
- Benchmark where your position is compared to your competitors
- Find out who the best advertisers are and delve into their PPC campaign strategies in great detail:
o Find out what keywords they’re using
o Learn how they ad group their campaign
o Uncover their A/B split test ad copy
o Dissect their landing pages.
For Example:
Let’s say you’re in the “Credit Report” business. Your website is Creditchecktotal.com.
Figure 3
- From Figure 3, you can see that you rank #8 in your niche with the Impression Share of 52%. Compared that with the #1, Freecreditreportinstantly.com which has 98.8% Impression Share.
- You’re missing a lot of potential impression. Which mean, your ads only shows up only 50% of the time when user search for your keywords!
You can now further investigate on how Freecreditreportinstantly.com achieves such a strong position.
Figure 4
- You can see these are the 4 ad copies that they use for months.
- The first ad has been running for 3 months, which means there’s a good chance this is a working ad copy for them.
How about the landing pages? iSpionage also shows you the landing page URLs associated with the ad copy.
Below are the landing pages creative that Freecreditreportinstantly.com uses.
Figure 5.a The landing page creative that’s been running for 3 months
Figure 5.b The latest landing page.
I will ask my web developer to work on landing page that looks similar to 5.a. It’s been proven working for them!
With iSpionage, you can also find out the keywords used to trigger the ad copy-landing page combination.
You see, studying your competitors’ strategies will allow you to:
- Optimize your PPC campaign faster by leveraging what your competitors have already tried.
- Get the edge in your search marketing campaigns and always stay one step ahead of the competition.
Remember this:
Your competitors’ gain is YOUR lost. Each of their customers can be and should be yours.
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