PPC - Pay Per Click Management

As much as there is a significance to how you create your own pay per click advertising campaign, it is vital that advertisers make sure that they fully analyse their competitor’s PPC campaigns too. This is because a competitor’s campaign will directly affect the success your campaign will have when it is up and running. The problem with this, though, is that many advertisers are unsure how they should analyse competitor’s campaigns and what in particularly they should look for – and from this, what are they meant to do with such information? Hopefully some understanding of how to analyse competitor’s PPC campaigns will come from reading this article.

First things first, we need to understand why we analyse competitor’s campaigns:

• To learn – There is no such thing as a perfect campaign. Therefore, you may find you have forgotten an optimisation tip that your competitor is currently using against you (even as a USP).
• To react – From knowing what the competition is doing with PPC will give you an edge. You can now react to their campaigns in order to make yours more effective in clicks and conversions than theirs.
• To understand – At the end of the day, every part of a campaign will have an explanation to why it is done that way. Just like with my ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign‘ series, you can learn a lot by asking yourself ‘why did the advertiser create the campaign in this way?’

From this, analysing a competitor’s PPC campaign should come a lot easier. Here are a few things you should look out for and analyse in particularly:

• The search advert – Seeing what ad extensions competitors use and how they structure their advert (whether it is title heavy in content or description heavy) will give you a good idea into how they are targeting traffic. Title heavy suggests they want to get the web user’s attention more whereas ad extensions suggests they want to improve the conversion rate.
• The landing page – The landing page, from my point of view, is one of, if not the, most important aspect of the whole PPC campaign. Therefore, what I would suggest is that you look at the type of landing page your competitors have used compared to yours, why they have done this  and then try to find pros and cons with it (which you could then relate to your landing page).

Of course, I haven’t even mentioned anything about CPC! Where the adverts are placed in comparison to yours and other competitors is also extremely important information too since this gives you a clear representation of how aggressive in terms of CPC competitors are adopting for their campaign. If they are top, they are being extremely aggressive – if so why? Every part of a competitor’s PPC campaig can be scrutinised which will, in turn, help you better understand PPC and your campaign.