Why Competitor Analysis is a Must for Any Google Adwords PPC Campaign

Pay per click advertising was suppose to be the perfect medium to reach your potential customers. Your ad is shown to people searching for exactly what you are selling, in your chosen demographic or location and you pay only if they click on the advertisement. Sounds perfect and what could possibly go wrong? Well for many small businesses, it turns out their entire monthly marketing budget went out on bidding for keywords that neither attracted the right audience nor resulted in any sales.

Unfortunately for most of us, pay per click advertising has been confined to running tests after tests hoping to find out what works only to realize we have already lost a lot of money.

This is where competitor analysis comes in as one of the most important aspects of running any PPC campaign on search engines like Google.

Firstly when you perform competitor analysis, you are basically looking for certain key attributes of your competitor’s campaign such as:

• What keywords they are using.
• Number of clicks and searches for each keyword.
• Cost per click of each keyword.
• Exact ad text being used.
• URL of the advertisement landing page.
• Total budget for the month etc.

From just keywords point of view, competitor analysis is completely worth the time and money being invested. Once you know what keywords your competitors are using, you do not have to waste time doing your own research. You do not need to guess or go through trial and error in your own PPC campaign. You will have in front of you exactly which keywords are working, the number of clicks they are generating and at what cost. There is no other form of keyword research that is as effective as knowing what is already working at the moment for your competitors.

Apart from keyword research, competitor analysis helps you learn about the exact ad messages being used by various companies in your space. You can then write your own ads accordingly. Ad text data comes with which ads are generating the most clicks and again at what cost. This provides a clear picture in terms of what appeals to potential customers.

You not only get exact ad text being used in competitor analysis, you also get the URLs where customers are redirected to after clicking an ad. With this, you get a complete image of the sales funnel being used by competitors – from keywords to ad text and landing page.

Now imagine if you had all this information with you from multiple competitors, wouldn’t it make a huge difference to your own campaign? It would hardly take any time to understand what is working, what is not and what your PPC campaign should look like. You would also know the budget for each keyword helping you plan your resources better.

Keywords, cost per click, ad text, budget information are just some of the data you get when conducing competitor analysis. Overall the value of competitor research for PPC campaigns is immense and quite frankly it is an absolute necessity if you want better returns on your investment for your marketing efforts.