Why You Should Never Start a PPC Campaign Without Spying on Your Competitors

Source: Neil Patel

One successful PPC campaign can lay the foundation for profits for years to come.

But PPC is complicated.

There are countless moving parts that can make or break your campaigns.

Which in turn, can make or break your ROI.

You can’t risk jumping into a PPC campaign without doing intensive research.

Luckily, you can always get started with a competitive analysis as the first step.

Why? Because your competitor has already made the mistakes, so you don’t have to!

And they’ve figured out what works, too.

So don’t just blindly A/B test for the next six months without knowing if you’re going to break even.

Skip to the front of the virtual line and jump straight to the good stuff.

You just have to know where to look and what to look for.

First, I’ll explain why you should never start a PPC campaign without spying on your competitors.

Then, I’ll show you exactly how to do it.

Why spying on competitors can fail-proof your ads

Let me ask you a simple question.

If you’ve never played a sport before in your life, would you head over to the local park and jump right into the game?

Or would you first watch a few videos online, maybe read some books, and ask a few friends for help?

I’m betting the latter was your answer, right?

Spying is a more aggressive way to say, “I’m kindly taking a look at the strategy and methods other people have found successful to inform my own decisions.”

You wouldn’t jump into something new without researching the best strategies.

And the same goes for PPC. Especially because your money is on the line.

Paid search only makes up 10% of traffic. But the trick is that this traffic is primed to convert.

They’re looking for ways to solve their problems ASAP.

That means that, if you get things right on the first try, you can start generating customers tomorrow.

You can’t afford to let those customers slip through your fingers because of a sub-par offer and horrendous landing page.

You need to be fully prepared.

Competitor research makes that a cinch.

The biggest players in your industry have already hit on a ‘formula’ to follow.

They’ve made the mistakes and are only putting good money behind solid campaigns now.

Here’s how you can learn from them.

You can find unknown competitors

It’s no secret that Google AdWords dominates the PPC world.

Most people who are getting their feet wet in PPC advertising start out on the AdWords search network.

In fact, Google currently earns 78% of the $36.7B U.S. search ad revenues. That number is soon to hit 80% and will continue to rise!

So the best way to go about scouting your competitors and learning who exactly you’re competing with is through AdWords itself.

If you do know your competitors, you can still find value in checking AdWords to see what companies are bidding on your top keywords.

I’d be willing to bet you’ll find some interesting data.

First, you want to open up your AdWords account and navigate to the “Auction Insights” report from your campaign dashboard.

The Auction Insights report will show you a list of all the current domains that are bidding on the same keywords as the campaign or ad group you select.

Essentially, it’s a curated list of your direct or indirect competition.

Most people know who they compete with directly.

However, your customers have hundreds, if not thousands, of alternative solutions.

They might not deliver the same quality of service as you do. But they might be a fraction of the price.

The point is that your ‘competition’ is probably much bigger than you think.

There’s a lot going on in this report, so let me break down the best place to start.

Impression share will list your top competition.

It’s a metric that tells you how many impressions you share with a given competitor for each campaign or keyword.

You are essentially fighting with those top impression-share sites for views and clicks.

If a site holds fewer than 10% of impression shares, they aren’t competing very highly with you. You can feel free to ignore them.

You can also filter this table by device and campaign to see who is your biggest competition on multiple platforms.

Once you’ve had a chance to play with the data and filter it by your campaigns, simply download a spreadsheet of the data and get ready to use it for the next strategy!

Now let’s use those competitors to extract some keywords.

How to find your competition’s best keywords

SEMRush and SpyFu are my two favorite tools to help you figure out which keywords your competition is profiting from.

That means that you barely have to do any manual keyword research besides sifting through what they’re already using.

For this example, we’ll use SpyFu, and I’ll show you how to find your competition’s most profitable keywords.

First, open up SpyFu and type in your competitor’s domain name in the search box:

One of the best features that SpyFu offers is their history feature. For example, it allows you to check out how PPC keywords have shifted over time.

You can see past versions of their ads and how they’ve performed.

You can also see trending keywords and their current profitability.

And you can see how long someone’s been using AdWords.

This allows you to see their PPC mistakes and avoid them entirely in your own campaign!

For example, if you type in Amazon as your competitor, you immediately see their account history.

More importantly, you can find the paid keywords they’ve targeted over this entire duration.

You might not be willing to match their $10.9 million ad spend every month.

That’s OK! Luckily, you don’t have to. The goal is to simply see what’s working and what’s not at this stage.

SpyFu also helps you dig deep into their previous campaigns to see what didn’t work.

For example, you can use their historical data to see why a campaign failed or why…

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