Posted January 20th, 2017 by Kirti & filed under Google Ads Tips.

PPC competition can be intimidating. But being innovative and adopting best practices can help fight your AdWords competitors intelligently.

In this post we will unlock some key features that will give your account and your campaign’s competitiveness a boost.

The Strategies to Win From Your AdWords Competitors

1. Segment By Time

Segment your campaign/ ad group or keywords by time and further by ‘day of week’ or ‘hour of day’ to find out when your average position is low (avg. pos. <3 would mean that your ads are not showing on the top pf page results) , implying that bids aren’t competitive. You must raise bids during that time to be equally competitive. Similarly on figuring out the time of the day when your average position is high (avg. pos. is between 1-3), you can reduce or not make any adjustments to the bid to remain cost effective.

2. Location Geo Reports

Similarly segmenting your location by time can help you be more competitive during peak hours and lay low during the time when it is less competitive. You can alternately identify the days when a location drives more results and schedule your ads more often during that time or day of the week. Here is a post on How to Use Ad Scheduling to Optimize Your AdWords Campaign? that you might want to have a look at.

On the other note, you can use the Geo/ Location Reports to identify locations where your audience is physically located and which garnered the maximum impressions and clicks.

This report gives a clear picture of which geographic locations are performing and which not. You can make bid adjustments to drive more traction and results.

3. Use Auction Insight Report To Find Competition

To access insights on how your ads are performing to competition and who your competitors are, use the Auction Insights Report.

You can use the report for instance, at the keyword level to figure out how your ads are performing for your brand keywords. To outrank the competitor bidding competitively for your brand term or your desired keywords, you can further change your bidding strategy to ‘Target Outranking Share’, which will modify your bids accordingly.

Similarly using the auction report to identify which device is being used by competitors for a specific keyword or set of keywords can help you decide a better device strategy and you can increase your bids for the device type your competition shows for.

4. Use Search Terms Report

Keeping a tab on which are the new and unbidded keywords that are getting impressions for your campaigns is possible by accessing the Search Terms Report. Use this report to find keywords that can be later competitive. Here is a post ‘Analyze Search Terms To Optimize AdWords Performance‘ that will put more light on the how to go about utilizing the report.

5. Try Message Extension

AdWords recently launched the Message Extension to bridge the gap between marketers and customers by utilizing SMS as a medium of interaction. Though still in the nascent stage, you can utilize its full potential to stay ahead of competition and up your game. To optimize the Message Extension our Message Tracking Tool can help you measure and track the ROI resulted from it.

6. Gmail Ads

Using Gmail Ads is yet another way to make sure to reach out to customer base being already reached out by your competition. You can use the competitor’s name as keywords and target your Gmail ads ( the promotional ads that show on top of your Gmail Inbox). So the next time your competitor sends an email to the customer, your ad will be shown to the customer.

Using the aforesaid strategies will sure make you move a step further and face the competition in a planned manner. We would love to know of any other tactic that you adopted and which happened to work out fantastically for your AdWords campaign.

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