As easy as some advertisers think it is to make money from PPC, it’s just as easy to not. PPC is a form of advertising that will vary depending on what your choose to advertise about. An advert wanting to promote football (or soccer) will have to be structured differently to an advert wanting to promote grocery food. There are many factors you need to take into consideration when you create your own PPC campaign. One factor you need to decide on is whether you should ‘go with the flow’ and copy your competitors within your market or be daring and diversify your campaign to something completely new.
Today, I found it to be a very nice day in England (which you don’t get a lot!) and decided to have a walk down a river. This led me onto the creation of this article. A river flows and whatever is in the river flows alongside the current. ‘How can PPC relate to a river 
flowing?’ you might be thinking. Well, a river’s current can prove to be beneficial to what is in the water (let’s say a fish). It doesn’t have to require any energy to move itself and swim downstream because the current will push him along.
Compare this to PPC where your competitors within your market is the current. They are all pointing one direction, pushing each other along to move themselves down stream producing synergy like results. In the case of a business, they are trying to make money. For this reason, you can go in either of two ways when deciding whether you should ‘go with the flow’ in PPC:
Follow your Competition
This method is a low risk strategy that can guarantee your campaign consistent results. When I say ‘follow your competition’, I mean for you to base your campaign around those of your competition. Look at their text adverts and create similar style adverts. Look at what websites they place and target their adverts at. If a competitor is doing it, it must be making them successful. Therefore, you should do it too! The downside to this strategy that if you make your campaign too similar to your competition’s, it will become harder for the reader to differentiate your advert and product/service to your competitions. As well as this, you will be entering a saturated market. Due to this, the CPC and keyword pricing will be a lot higher than normal.
Diversify Your Campaign
This strategy does have a lot of risk involved. However, if the risk pays off, the rewards will be a lot higher than the above strategy. By the word ‘diversifying’, I mean for you to make your campaign completely different, separate and unique to your competition’s. This will make your advert stand out to your competitors as it will have a totally different approach to the normal advert. The only problems with this strategy is time and risk. The risk of getting your campaign wrong will lose you time and money and as time = money in business, its a double negative. As well as this, you will need to spend time in thinking up a diversifying strategy good enough to produce a USP that your competition don’t already have. Yet, if you find that sweet spot in PPC, you will find yourself all alone in a niche market gaining highly successful results with just pennies spent.
So there are two strategies you can implement. Will you go with the current and copy your competition’s campaign or swim upstream and go your own way? Remember, what you are advertising about will have a great deal of effect on how you advertise it. From this, mould the campaign around what you are trying to advertise.
