Who are the people in your neighborhood? Getting to know your competitors…

Many times when I ask clients who their competitors are, they list off their top offline competitors—but most of them are not present in the PPC marketplace! Clients are somewhat surprised by which companies they are bidding against on the search engine result pages. This being said, what is the value of knowing who you are competing against?

You can learn a lot from the top competitors in your marketplace, whether you are just starting to build out your PPC campaign or have been running PPC for a long time. With the right tools you can see what keywords your competitors are targeting, approximately what they are spending, what positions their ads are in and what messaging they are using for specific keywords. All these things can help you expand your campaign and increase the performance as well.

Luckily there are several websites that are able to help you with this analysis and aggregate all the information in one place for you. There are a lot of free and paid tools available, which you can find by searching around; but I would recommend using KeywordSpy.com or SpyFu.com. Both offer free trials with limited results, which can give you some good insights, but it is well worth subscribing even if it is just for a month. These sites make it very easy to see who are your competitors and what they are doing with their PPC campaigns.

The first step is identifying your top competitors, which you can do by going to the keyword research site you prefer and typing in your website URL. A list of competitors who advertise on similar keywords will appear, however you should go to their site and ensure they are similar to your website and the products you sell. You can also see the amount of PPC keywords they are using in their campaign, so it’s good to look for competitors with a broader range of keywords than you are using so you can find areas in which to expand. However, you may find good learnings from competitors with the same size or smaller keyword portfolios, so it is always good to look at both. Also, you can find other competitors by using the keyword research site on your competitor’s domain as well.

Once you have identified your top competitors, you can start your analysis. You want to look through the keywords they are targeting and the value of those keywords to them. You can tell the value of a keyword by the bid position, keywords in top positions (i.e., first, second, third) are most likely their top converting keywords. While keywords in real low positions (i.e., ninth or lower) are poorer-performing keywords that probably don’t get many sales or have high cost per sales but still help funnel searchers looking for their products. Taking note of the bid position is important so you know which keywords are more risky and that you may need to keep a closer eye on.

Take a good look at which keywords they are targeting and if you see keywords that you are not targeting think about adding them. Most of the keyword research websites will give you the CPCs of the keywords and the competitiveness, giving you some insight into how much extra budget you will need for the new keywords. You can also use keyword tools to find other keyword recommendations based on the new keywords you found from you competitors.

Next, look at your competitor’s ads and see what messaging they are using for which keywords. This is valuable because they may have messaging you have never tested or that could allow you to differentiate you ads from your competitors. Often you will see a majority of PPC ads on a results page with the same ad title, because everyone is implementing keyword insertion for the ad title. So having a static ad title may work better, because your ad stands out on the page from the competition that all have the keyword the searcher typed in as their ad title. Your competitor’s ads can also show you if they have special promotions they are running or new seasonal products; you may have better deals and want to promote them to draw searchers to your website over your competitors’.

Its also good to click on your competitor’s ads and see which pages they are driving searchers to on their website. Do they have custom landing pages? Are they driving traffic to the home page, category pages, or product-specific pages? Then compare your findings to where you are driving searchers. You want to ensure you are creating a search experience as valuable as your competitors’ so searchers think of your website in the same regard as the other top competitors in your marketplace. Otherwise, searchers may not come back to your website, even though you have the products they are looking for because they weren’t brought directly to them when they searched, so they don’t think of you when they are ready to purchase.

Finally, you can see which keyword they are targeting organically as well: organic keywords are good because they should be the keywords your competitor thinks best represents their business and drives valuable traffic to their website. So, again, you may be able to get some keyword ideas for you PPC campaign from these keywords as well.

So as you can see, you can find a lot of valuable information from your competitors. Some have been running PPC a lot longer than you, and some may have just started; but either way, they can give you ideas you may have missed. You will also have a better sense of what they are spending on PPC and if you are truly competing against them or missing out on a big piece of the marketplace.