Don’t Love thy Enemy, Track Them!
Oct 16, 2007 Analytics Tools
The old adage “keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer” has never been truer when it comes to pay-per-click advertising campaigns. Search competition first reared it’s head with SEO, where everyone was scurrying to find the top ad formula that kept changing, and now it’s not all that different with PPC. Your first weapon is knowledge, and we like to keep your arsenal stock piled.
Let’s say your loyalties are with a third party analytics tool such as Omniture or Webtrends, congratulations, both are great tools. If you’re pushing serious e-commerce through your site, you may not want to share conversion data with Google, because they have been known to share data from time to time. But, there are some things only Google can tell you, and some things that should be tracked manually. I’ve already commented on the greatness of Google Analytics ad nauseum, so let’s examine the things you should track manually:
- Heads up on display ads. If you’re not keeping an eye on your competition’s display ads, and reacting to promotions and alternate call to actions, you’re letting your ads get stale and handing a gift to your competitors.
- Bust out the night cap. Day-parting your campaigns has two strong benefits, targeting your key demographics by search behavior and taking advantage of less competition in off-peak hours. Checking the SERPs the same time and same day of each week won’t cut it to understand the bigger picture.
- Are you clear for landing… pages? Even if your competitors do not change their display ads, they’re likely to make occasional changes to their landing pages. Is that 5% drop in conversion just a random fluctuation in search traffic, or did your competitor introduce a sale that’s undercutting you? Some are even sneaky enough to be using multivariate testing, which may show you different landing pages randomly.
- Don’t be so provincial. Keep in mind that competitors may be displaying different ads and targeting promotions to different geographical areas. Geo-targeting is beautiful, ain’t it? What you may see in New York might not be same SERPs that visitors see in Los Angeles. Dust off your list of free proxy servers to reveal the plethora of competitors you’ve been missing, it might surprise you!
- Those dirty %@#$%*s! You’ve probably got some high-spend campaigns that are really your bread and butter, but don’t discount the power and profitability of your trademarked brand names. You’re paying peanuts for them (or should be) and competition is low. However, affiliates and competitors have been known to sneak in an ad here and there to snatch up some of that very lucrative traffic. Be sure to contact the legal team at all the search engines to get your trademarks protected from display ads.
A strategy that I use personally is to keep a competition binder, with screenshots of SERPs and print-outs of landing pages for my top 3-5 competitors. I don’t do this for every campaign, but it’s a great asset to have just in case your high-profile campaign conversions take a dive. It just might save your job/contract!
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