Knowing The Competition

When managing your PPC advertising campaigns it is very important to know what your competition is doing. This will give you an indication as to what keywords are being used and how your competition is bidding. You can also build on your competitors’ successes and learn from their mistakes.

You can learn from competitors in a number of ways. Firstly you can check on the keywords they are using. There are software programs that can tell you this. If you run a number of campaigns, or are selling a popular item, you may want to invest in this software. Once you are aware of the keywords competitors are using you can try them out and add variants.

Secondly you can also see what sort of bids they are doing on important keywords. Once you know this you can have an idea of what to bid on these keywords yourself in order to get a good position for your ad. It is important to bid competitively but not to indulge in price wars. You should always bid within your budget. If you are getting out bid on certain keywords use variants that are not so expensive but will still bring in sales.

Examining your competitors’ ads can be quite an eye opener. Google ads allow you to do this with their preview tool. You can also take a look at the little Google ads on the search pages that your main keywords bring up. Areas to look for are; headlines, benefits and of course the call for action. You should never copy and paste your competitors’ ads, just use them to get ideas and a feel of how to create a pulling ad. When you look through a number of them through the eyes of a buyer you will soon see which ones would make you buy the product.

The final thing I recommend looking at is the competition’s landing pages. By following the links in their ads, you can get a good sense of quality layouts and presentation as well as the benefits and bonuses being offered.

Looking at what your competitors are doing with their campaigns should help to inspire you with ideas for your own. With these new ideas combined with your own original ideas in your arsenal, your PPC advertising campaign can be reborn as a much stronger incarnation of itself. A successful manager knows the importance of keeping up with their competitors and making improvements accordingly. No matter how great your campaign is, there is always room for improvement.

For those of you who may be feeling a bit skeptical about this, thinking it is a bit underhanded, I give you this. If you think your competition isn’t out there doing the same things we discussed here, you are wrong. Anyone who runs a successful PPC advertising campaign knows the importance of keeping tabs on the competition. There is no better way to learn a campaigns strengths and weaknesses.

PPC Ads Require Adjusting and Optimizing

When you manage a PPC advertising campaign, you will need to constantly tweak it in order to maximize your profit. The following will explain in depth the three major areas which you will need to tweak in order to keep your campaign running smoothly.

The first aspect of your PPC advertising campaign which will need tweaking are the keywords. Since keywords are crucial to the success of your campaign they will need to be adjusted quite often to keep them optimized. The trends of searchers change frequently so you will need to weed out poor performers and add new words to replace them and broaden your horizons.

Your bidding will also play a crucial role in your PPC advertising campaign and hence should be analyzed and adjusted as needed. A high bid on a strongly performing keyword is vital to maximize your profits as it will get a better position for your ad. If you see a keyword which is bringing in decent sales from a low position you should almost definitely bid stronger on that keyword. Another good idea would be to add similar keywords to your list.

Along these same lines, a poor performing keyword in a high position can be devastating to your campaign. This is basically wasted money. You will want to lower the bid to save some money or possibly even put a truly poor keyword on pause and use another keyword.

Your ads in your PPC advertising campaign are also important. Many people set up the ads and leave them, not realizing they are giving up profits by doing this. They concentrate on keywords and bids without paying attention to the ad. A simple way to adjust an ad to make it produce optimum profits is to split test it. You can then use the best performing ad and make more sales. Split testing can be done over and over again until you get an ad that is giving you the best profits.

Landing pages can also be adjusted. You can do this by split testing, using more than one landing page for a campaign. The success of your campaign is also determined by landing pages and sales pages. It is no good having a great campaign if it is not pointing to a pulling sales page. Similarly you can split test any sales pages that your campaign is pointing to.

Recording all adjustments and results is a critical part of tweaking and optimizing your PPC advertising campaign. You can do this on a program like Excel and put all the details on a spread sheet. This is how you will determine what adjustments are working and which ones should be replaced. When you keep a record of these details you will save your time and get better results.

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