Outsmarting Your Competition in High-Stakes PPC Markets

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Outsmarting Your Competition in High-Stakes PPC Markets Posted: 10 Jan 2012 12:53 PM PST Posted by TastyPlacement This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Are you competing in a high-stakes PPC market with bids in the $25 to $40 range? If you are, don't simply fight your competition head on; if you do, you'll end up paying premium prices for clicks you might capture for far less. There are several shrewd approaches you can employ to side-step your less-vigilant competitors. We've learned a few valuable tricks that can earn you valuable clicks for less-than-premium prices. The techniques begin with carefully monitoring PPC activity throughout the day to discover low-competition time slots in the PPC bidding and striking while your competition snoozes. Getting Started The types of campaigns for which these techniques will work will be high bid environments with smaller but determined competitors. You want to look for competitors bidding for terms in the $20-and-up range, but whose campaigns are not fully budgeted to run at the maximum number of available clicks. Specifically, we want to look for competitors' ads that don't appear consistently or whose ads disappear later in the day. Smaller competitors tend to fit this model fairly often. An illustrative keyword example we see in our local market of Austin Texas is "Personal Injury Lawyer". We know the bids in that space are $24 to $30 depending on the time of the day--but we see some advertisers drop out at various times of the day. For illustration, we'll examine Google's Adwords system, but these principles will apply to any PPC program. Identify Your Competitor's Ad Schedule Google's Adwords system has a scheduling feature that allows advertisers to run ads during particular times of the day, and even enter positive or negative bid adjustments based on times of the day. Here's the catch: the Adwords system only allows the scheduling to be made in increments of 15 minutes, as shown in the screenshot below. So, if your PPC competition is employing the ad scheduler, it become fairly easy to identify when they stop running ads by running test searches throughout the day at 15-minute intervals. Once you've identified a competitor using the ad scheduler, you've just found a soft spot--your bid competition will be lower during the times of the day when that competitor isn't bidding on ads. If you can identify more than one competitor, then you've found and even more favorable environment. Identifying Competitors' Under-Budgeted Campaigns There is another way to determine soft spots in PPC bidding: look for under-budgeted campaigns. You can identify your competition's under-budgeted campaigns fairly easily. An under-budgeted campaign is one where the advertisers daily budget will not supply the maximum number of clicks available to that advertiser. So, say a competitor is paying an average of $20 per click for a particular keyword; assume further that their daily budget is only $60--yet there are ten clicks available to that advertiser. That advertiser has only budgeted enough to purchase three clicks, so Google is forced to economize ad delivery--and it gives advertisers only two choices: standard delivery and accelerated delivery. Standard delivery means that Google will spread the ads throughout the day. In practice, Google might show an ad every third time a keyword is searched. Accelerated delivery means that Google will simply show an advertiser's ads every time they are triggered by a search query until the advertiser's daily budget is exhausted. There lies the opportunity: if your competitor is employing the accelerated delivery method with an under-budgeted campaign, that means their ads will eventually stop running at some point during the day. You'll know that your competitors are employing accelerated ad delivery if their ads show consistently in the morning (in 99% of cases, advertisers set their time zone correctly so a Google Adwords "day" begins in the morning) but their ads disappear at random times in the afternoon from day to day. Outsmarting the Under-Budgeted Competitor So, how can you capitalize on a competitor that employs accelerated ad delivery? Say your competitor is fighting hard for position one for a particular query and will not yield on their bid price in order to stay on top (that's a fool's approach, as we'll see). You can force your competitor to exhaust their budget more quickly by simply raising your bid as high as you can without dislodging the competitor from position one. Google's bid price calculation system takes care of the rest: Google adjusts the actual cost-per-click to be based on the dollar amount needed to exceed the "next ranked ad." If the next ranked ad (you) has a higher bid then the ad that got the click (your aggressive-bidding competitor) costs more. Thus, you can knock your competitor out earlier in the day while at the same time increasing their cost-per-click. Be warned though, you will, of course, be raising your bid, so you could potentially wind up paying more for clicks you do get. Now to Enjoy the Lighter Competition With your competitor's budget exhausted in the later hours of the day, the competitive bidding for a particular keyword/keywords thins significantly. If circumstances line up properly, you can lower your bids in the afternoon hours and enjoy far less expensive clicks, and better click-through rates (and, ultimately, higher quality scores). There are two ways to approach lowering your bids in the later part of the day. The first approach employs the advanced "bid adjustment" feature in the Adwords ad scheduler described above. To use the bid adjustment feature, log in to your Adwords account, click on a campaign, and then click the "Settings" tab. From there, scroll down to the Advanced Settings section and select "Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling" and then click on "Edit" in the "Ad scheduling" subsection. This will reveal the ad schedule pop-up window (shown below). At the top of the pop-up window, you want to click "Bid adjustment" mode. You can then set specific time periods on specific days and apply a percentage multiplier to lower your bid. In the screenshot below, we've adjusted our campaign from 4pm to 7:30pm to adjust our bids to 72% of the standard bid. At all other times, our bid prices stay at the standard bid prices we've selected. There it is, we've just adjusted our bids downward to enjoy the lighter competitive market we've identified that takes place during later hours of the day. There's a second approach to lowering bids later in the day that is a bit less elegant, but still effective. The second approach involves simply creating two ad campaigns: a first campaign scheduled to run during the earlier, more competitive hours of the day, and a second campaign with lower bid prices that is scheduled to run from say, 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. The advantage to this approach is that you'll have separate analytic data for the separate campaigns. We prefer this second technique for specifically this reason. We hope you've learned a bit from this article. While a bit Machiavellian, the techniques we've outline can help in competitive markets, and certainly the lessons here can be transposed into your daily PPC activities. Do you like this post? Yes No

Universal Search Results in PRO - Part 1: Local Results Posted: 10 Jan 2012 12:58 AM PST Posted by adamf Now that the holidays have passed, we’re back in full swing at SEOmoz. I’m happy to offer another product announcement for PRO members. We’ve just shipped phase one of our support for Universal Search results, which includes data about local (a.k.a. places) results in Google search results. Whether it's a 7-pack or a blended result, if you care about local SERP results, it's often a pain to find out where you stand. We aim to help. If you're not sure why visibility in blended or enhanced results are important, I highly recommend reading Dr. Pete's eye tracking study. His experiments nicely show that universal results that break up the page or results with enhanced elements can draw people's focus, even from strong organic results at the top of the page. As I noted, this first phase rolls out local results for Google. In the coming weeks we plan to add other types of results, including video, images, shopping, news. We are also looking to incorporate site links (1-box results) at some point. We debated whether to wait until we had the other types of universal results in place before launching, but decided to ship in this limited fashion so we can get some feedback from all of you to help us make it better as we build more capabilities. Here’s a quick rundown of what we've added: See Which of Your Keywords Contain Local Results in the SERP The first change you may notice is on the Ranking Overview page. If we saw a 7-pack or blended local result in the SERP for one of your keywords, you'll now see a small pushpin icons just below your ranking for that engine. There are two different states of the icon. If you are not in the universal result, you will just see the pushpin, but if you are included in the result, it will appear with happy little lines above it: If you are in the competitive rankings view, you will see the vertical result show up in the column with your site's ranking.  A Quick Look at the Details While in the overview, you can learn more about what is contained in the local result by hovering over the icon. This will offer up information including where the vertical is on the page, how many results it contains, and also a list of the results shown in the order presented: More Information on the Rankings Detail Page To see even more detail, click on the keyword or the "view ranking history for more details" link in the tooltip. Here, on the ranking details page, you will see universal results added to the ranking history graph, so you can see where universal results have been included over time and in which position (sorry, I don't yet have historical data for this sample campaign): If you scroll further down, you will find the SERP overview, which includes blended and enhanced results alongside the organic results we saw in the SERP. As with organic results, your and your competitors' results will also be highlighted in color, so it's easy to get a feel for the overall visibility of you and your competitors on a search engine results page. Here you can see a result where the local 7-pack pushes down what would normally look like a really strong #3 organic result below the fold: Conversely, you can also see when you are dominant at the top of a SERP, which is common for branded terms: For reference, here's what this looked like in the original SERP: What's Up Next? Our plans going forward are to push out support for more universal search types. Our order of priority at the moment is: Video Images Shopping News Site Links We'd love to hear from you if you think this is out of order, or if there is a different type of result that you think is more important than the rest of these. I’ll publish a quick follow-up post when new result types are added. Please Let Us Know What You Think As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated. If you have thoughts about how this could be better, please share a comment in the post or add a request in our feature request forum. Do you like this post? Yes No

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