Do you know who your competitors are? They’re not always the ones you think. Say for instance you’re HP. When most people are asked to name the competition, the typical responses will include Dell, Sony, Apple or similar big brands. While this is true from an overall business perspective, when talking about online marketing, and more specifically, paid search, it’s not the best or most complete answer.
HP’s competition in paid search falls into a few different categories listed below.
- Manufacturers: HP, Acer
- Retail Sites: Best Buy, Tiger Direct
- Comparison Shopping Sites: NexTag, Shopping.AOL.com
- Affiliates: HPoffers.com, anycoupons.com
- Others: Microsoft, uBid.com, 4allmemory.com, eToys.com
…and these are just some of the advertisers I’ve found bidding for laptop related terms.
While these are all the businesses that are competiting against them in paid search, they shouldn’t be looked at the same way. They each have different goals their trying to reach that most likely aren’t the same as each others and thus their strategies and tactics will differ from one another.
When defining your competition, you need to be specific to the keywords your going after. The competitive landscape looks different for the word cheap laptop than it does for HP laptops. For the terms that are most important to you, you should be taking a look at each of the ads listed, examining their creatives, landing pages and business model. With the creatives and landing pages, you want to look at what the selling points are, how your products compare to theirs and if they’re targeting the same market as you. The business model part of this is also very important. Each keyword will be profitable for a certain group of advertisers. If there’s a keyword you’re thinking of bidding on that doesn’t have a lot of your true competitors listed in the results, then that is one indication that the term may not be profitable for your campaigns.
Sometimes, Dell and Apple might be the biggest competitors, other times, it might be your own affiliates. Whoever they are, you should be using different strategies against each.
Many times, advertisers will just throw in a bunch of keywords and make changes based on the metrics they see for their account. While managing an account this way can work, it’s wasteful and won’t lead to the best results. Defining who your competitors are will help you determine which keywords you should be bidding on, what positions you should first test and what type of creatives/landing pages appeal to users. You’re also able to keep an eye on them to see what changes they make that provides insights as to how their campaigns are performing or if their strategies are changing. Overall, making sure you know who your true competitors are and being able to analyze them properly will give you an edge over advertisers who are not looking at this information.
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