How to Outsmart your PPC Competition

Depending on the industry you belong to, PPC can prove to be an extremely competitive strategy to

conquer. Your Pay Per Click Management team will put in long hours of hard work into your campaign

and your competitors will still manage to have a leg up against you. These tips can help you outsmart

your competition in the PPC world –

Focusing on your Quality Scores

Your Quality Score is a function of your ad, the landing page and the keyword that you are bidding on.

Controlling these three items allows you to ensure relevancy levels for your prospective consumers. It is

important to strive for quality scores for all keywords except the competitor brand names. This is

because the higher your score the lower will be your cost per click.

How to achieve this?

You need to improve your score and get a higher placement. You also want to lower minimum bids for

keywords and improve click through rates. The following steps can help you achieve this –

1. Make sure your campaigns are structured using smaller, tighter and more relevant ad groups.

2. Make sure your ad copy and keywords are optimized

3. Make sure your landing pages also contain content with keywords that you are targeting.

Reviewing Auction Insight Reports

This is essentially an AdWords tool that allows Pay Per Click Advertising Strategists to see other

competitors that are vying for the same keywords as oneself. This review can help provide critical

insights into how your PPC campaign is performing against other competitors.

While performing this review, make sure that you follow these 5 key metrics –

1. Impression share

2. Average position

3. Overlap rate – this stands for how often you and your competition had simultaneous

impressions

4. Position above rate – this represents how often your competitor’s ad appeared above yours

5. Top of page rate – this represents how often your ad was above the organic listings, i.e. in the

top 3 and not in the right side panel.

These reports are extremely valuable to advertisers. One can leverage these to be prepared for

upcoming competition and to gauge how your new strategy is performing against advertisers with an

existing campaign.

Leveraging Ad Extensions

These are a critical component of PPC campaigns as they allow you to exhibit additional information or

to “extend” your text ads. These tools helps in improving your visibility and appear only on those ads

which come above the search results as against on the right hand side bar.

Commonly used Ad Extensions worth considering include –

1. Site link extensions

2. Call extensions

3. Location extensions

4. Callout extensions

Finally, it is extremely important that you stay updated with PPC news, strategies and trends. The

scenario of online advertising is constantly changing. Assess what you are doing to stay in loop to these

evolving landscapes and how you intend to keep up with these changes. Hiring specialist PPC managers

is an excellent way to leverage their knowledge and experience to make sure you are constantly one

step ahead of your competition.

Get more information on: Pay Per Click Advertising and Pay Per Click Management