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As a business person, you will need some goods and services at some point. These could be raw materials or other needs for the business. To get these things at the best possible price, you’ve got to master competitor bidding.
If you are from the digital marketing background then to know about the competitors’ strategies and their ad positioning should be the important part of your marketing strategies as well.
The next section dives more into competitor bidding and it starts with the answer to the ‘what is competitive bidding?’ question.
In general, a competitive bid involves a price or proposal submitted by a service provider or vendor to a soliciting firm for a business opportunity. Such business opportunities typically involve a product or service offering. In simple terms, competitive bids involve business opportunities where a company presents a proposal for a business deal.
In digital marketing and specifically in pay-per-click(PPC), the process of setting a price of a click on ad is called bidding and competitors bidding is considered as to bid directly on your competitor’s brand keywords. E.g someone looks for McDonalds’ lunch deal on Google but on screen KFC lunch meal advertisement appear in front of him.
But why should you bid on competitor keywords? Well, here are some things to keep in mind.
If you carefully bid on your competitor’s brand terms, you could potentially boost your advertising performance in the marketplace. If your competitors are drawing lots of people to their product or service offerings, it means that those people could be your next customers. And if you carefully position your brand in such a way that it draws attention, you could potentially draw these people to your business.
Here are some compelling reasons why you should bid on competitor keywords.
A good search strategy should aim at covering more high-intent keywords. People who are searching for your competitors are probably in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. That is, they are most likely looking for products that are similar to yours, and will likely complete a purchase or lead form for your product. These prospects are more easily converted than people who are using generic keywords.
They pretty much have a good grasp of the product or service offering they desire, and if you’ve got a compelling unique value proposition, you’d likely win them over.
Your competitors have done the heavy lifting by convincing your potential customers that their product (which is similar to yours) offers the right solution for their needs. However, these prospects are somewhat skeptical – and that’s why you need to give them the needed push by positioning your brand as the brand that would most likely solve their problems.
To take advantage of a competitor’s term, you need to pay more – and the likelihood of generating enough conversion makes it worth every penny!
But to justify the cost of these competitor keywords, you’ve got to consider assessing down-funnel metrics like Cost Per Opportunity or CPSQL on competitor terms.
Generating direct leads and purchases are some of the major benefits of bidding on competitor terms – but that’s not all there is to it. Bidding on competitor terms could also help in boosting brand awareness and mindshare.
If a potential customer who is in the research phase is searching for your competitor, the customer may take note of other similar businesses that rank high in the same industry. This way, the customer gets to build a robust list of vendors in the niche market.
Bidding on competitor terms is much more beneficial than bidding on generic keywords. These terms tend to attract customers who are highly interested in your product or service offering, unlike generic keywords that may yield little to no results.
Customers who find you through competitor terms will most likely get acquainted with your brand name and value proposition.
Performing keyword research is good. However, if you want to get the most from your research process, you have to double down on competitor analysis research. To perform robust competitor analysis research, you need to follow these five easy steps.
The steps above are not easy. But you can automate most of the process by opting for an efficient keyword research tool – and that’s where the PPCexpo Keyword Planner comes in. The tool helps you identify keywords that would improve your targeting. It also helps you to easily measure the value of each keyword discovered during your keyword research process.
There are options to filter your results using monthly search volume, opportunity, CPC amount, and other filter options. There is an option of filtering using semantic similarity – and that pretty much allows you to use existing keywords to research words that are similar in meaning to your keywords.
To see people who are bidding on your keywords, you’ve got to consider using the Auction Insights reports option. The report lets you see the out ranking share, position above rate, impression shares, top-of-the-page rate, and the overlap rate of other competitors on your keywords.
The information provided will help you to effectively manage your bids in comparison to your other competitors in the market. If you desire a seamless research process, then you’ve got to consider marketing analytics software like the PPC Signal tool.
A marketing analytics software like the PPC Signal tool will help you manage your campaign, and also show you how your campaign is performing with respect to your target keywords. The PPC Signal tool uses a data-driven approach to showcase information about any anomaly in your campaign. This way, you get to save more time, effort, and resources. There are lots of filter options in the tool – and one of which is the keyword filter option.
With the keyword filter option, you get to keep a close eye on how your campaign keywords are performing, and also generate other relevant information that would help you in the long run.
The image below shows what the PPC Signal dashboard looks like.
The image below shows you how to get information that relates to the keyword performance of your campaign.
From the screenshot above, you’d notice that related information about the keywords shows after clicking on the keyword filter option.
If you’re looking for how to find the most profitable niches with little competition, just follow the steps outlined below.
Bidding on branded keywords is somewhat controversial. You’ve got to take a close look at the pros and cons – and if your research is good enough, you will notice that the pros outweigh the cons. By bidding on branded keywords, you’d pretty much control your brand messaging, and your ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
If you’re considering retargeting your competitor’s visitors, then you’ve got to deal with one issue – Google doesn’t have a competitor retargeting campaign option. But there are ways of targeting the audience who will likely buy your product or service offering – and one of such ways is opting for the custom intent audiences option.
With a custom intent-based audience, advertisers are more likely to target people who are interested in what they have to offer. And if done right, you’ll most likely attract a more engaged audience.
However, if you desire to have a more robust way of running a retargeting campaign on your competitor’s audience, then you need to consider inserting a tracking code on the website.
Yes it is legal to bid on competitor keywords as Google has nothing to do with such keywords for your campaigns.
Bidding on a competitor’s keyword is an effective way to grow your business. However, it’s resource-consuming – and you’d have to put in more resources to get good results. If you don’t have the budget for it, you should consider less-expensive options of targeting your competitor’s audience on Google. Alternatively, you should try using social media platforms.
Targeting a competitor’s keyword helps your brand appear on the same search engine results pages as your competition. Competitor keyword research is also a reliable way of unveiling your competitor’s weakness – and such weakness could be the valuable keywords that are not on their list.
If you desire to boost your potential conversions, then you should consider using your competitors’ names as your keywords. However, you have to tread carefully.
Competitor bidding is arguably the best way buyers get to have the best price or contract terms for their proposals. Simply put, they get the best sellers of a product or service offering while maintaining a low cost. Buyers who desire the best sellers should opt for competitor bidding.
By diving into competitor bidding, your competitor may choose to return the favor and do the same to you. But that doesn’t mean you won’t draw most of the clicks to your brand.
To generate good results, you need a tool to help you keep a close eye on your campaign performance – and that’s where the PPC Signal tool comes in. And if you’re looking for a comprehensive way of performing keyword research, then the PPCexpo keyword planner is arguably the best tool for you.
Now you know everything about competitor bidding, and what product or service offering you want to showcase to your audience.
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