Studying PPC ads for Consistent Advertising

One way to determine profitability is to watch the Pay-Per-Click ads that your competitors (or their affiliates) use. This is quite simple to do. Just search terms related to the market you plan to work in. Take a Forex example, you could Google terms like forex systems, automatic forex, or forex ebooks.

If your competitors are consistently running ads for the same keywords, it indicates that they are getting good return on their advertising dollars.

Try searching a main term one week, and then search it again a week later. If you see some of the same ads, then not only is this a possible advertising route for you should you decide to work in this market, it’s also a clear indication that your competitors are spending money on advertising and getting a good return on that investment.

The number of ads is also an indicator. If many of your future competitors are paying to advertise for a single term, it is a sign that you’re looking at a profitable market (and also a profitable search term).

If you need help finding some keywords, try typing some terms into Google’s Keyword Tool. Or, better yet, run one of your competitor’s sites through the tool. Then just begin searching, and watch the paid ads along the top and down the side of the search results.

Spyfu.com tool for Determining PPC Spending and Keywords

You can take the previous step further by determining how much your competitors are spending on advertising. A simple tool to accomplish this is http://www.spyfu.com.

If you type a keyword into this tool, it will tell you how much your competitors are spending, how many of your competitors post PPC ads using this keyword, and also how many people search for the term each month.

The more advertisers that you see (and the more it costs per click) the more viable that keyword is. More importantly, if an advertiser is spending $5 per click, and continue to do so, they must be making enough money with that ad to compensate for the cost.

Spyfu is a simple tool that allows you to enter a keyword or a URL and see who else is bidding on a campaign. For example, when I search the term dog collar, I am presented with a whole new set of information that can help me with my ad campaign. In the screenshot below I can tell that there are 20 people paying for the term dog collars, I can see that most of those ads get 22 to 27 clicks per day and I can also see that the top bid on that term is $1.21. From the chart on the right I can also see that this term has been paid for on a regular basis since Jul of 06. In other words I get a good idea the term “dog collars” has the potential to be profitable.

There’s more that I can do with a system like this though. Clicking on the top advertiser under the list I am presented with information about their whole campaign:

I can see that they spend between $430 - $1200 per day in ad costs, I can see about how many clicks they get per day, and I am presented with a chart of how long they have been advertising for.

This information alone is enough to tell me that this campaign is profitable. Looking at the chart this site had about a $200 ad budget back in 2008, and over the past year they have ramped that up to $1200 spent daily. There is no way they could maintain that spend level if they weren’t making more than the $1200 a day they are spending.

If I was using the paid version of Spyfu, I could get even more info though. Below the charts there is another section with useful info:

I can see which keywords this site is paying for, I can see which terms their site ranks for organically, and I even get information about their top competitors. With the free version of a tool like this I can see 10 – 20 keywords, if I were using the paid version I could potentially take all 502 keywords that this campaign has and use them to start my own ad campaign off profitably.

As a basic rule here, the more information you have before you select a niche, the more profitable you will be. Paying for a service like Spyfu isn’t necessary; but it will help you to determine profit levels of any niche, and later in the course when you are paying for your own ads it will get them working profitably much faster. If you can afford the small monthly fee for this one (or one of the other keyword tools) it will be worth the money you spend.

Infiltrate any niche you want with a proven, paint by numbers marketing plan by Chris Freville that quickly allows you to dominate niche markets