Nathan Yerian
Do you want to drive a stream of high quality traffic meant for your competitors to your website? If your competitor has a larger PPC budget than your company, you do not have to fight them head on for the same traffic. Doing so may mean spending far too much with meager ROI. There are several shrewd ways to side-step large spending on search marketing and still earn valuable clicks for less-than-premium prices.
Here are some ideas on how to steal quality web traffic from your competitors to your website:
Bid on your competitor’s brand names
Your target customers may already know the brand names of the products, or services they want to purchase. If the customers do not know the exact URL to visit or when they simply type the brand name into Google because they do not want to type the whole URL, PPC ads give you the opportunity to get them to your site. Congratulations, you just stole a potential customer.
Most companies do not bid on their brand names but instead focus on their products, or service categories. If your competitor is doing this, you can get quality traffic meant for them at pennies for clicks by bidding on their brand names.
Use Ad Scheduler to your advantage
Google PPC campaigns are scheduled to appear at intervals of 15 minutes during particular times of the day. Negative or positive adjustments can also be done in increments of 15 minutes. You can outsmart your competition by identifying their ad scheduling. Simply run test searches throughout the day at 15-minute intervals to find out if your competitors are using the ad scheduler and then bid when they are not bidding.
Identify under-budgeted campaigns
Under-budgeted search marketing campaigns offer a soft spot if you know what to do. If your competitor is running an under-budgeted campaign, you can strategically strike in to capture quality traffic meant for them to your site without spending a ton.
An under-budgeted campaign is one in which the number of clicks available to an advertiser cannot be satisfied by the advertiser’s daily campaign. For example, say an advertiser is paying an average of $15 per click for a target keyword and has a daily budget of $60 while the number of clicks available is 10. This means the advertiser will be losing 6 clicks since his budget only supports 4 clicks.
In an under-budgeted campaign, Google is forced to economize on delivery of an advertiser’s ads through standard delivery or accelerated delivery. Standard delivery means the ads will be shown in regular intervals during the day until the daily budget is exhausted. Accelerated delivery means the ads will show on priority until the budget is depleted.
To find out if your competitor has an under-budgeted campaign, check how frequent their ads appear during the day. You can then bid on their brand names or target keywords at a lower cost by scheduling your ads to appear when theirs are not being shown.
Another way to outsmart such a competitor is to raise the bidding price of the keywords you are both targeting. This means your competitor will exhaust his daily maximum budget quickly after which you can lower your bid price and enjoy increased traffic to your site.
Offer more value on your landing pages
Another search marketing trick to attracting more traffic is to optimize your landing pages to provide more value than your competitor. Check your competitor’s ad copy and landing page copy to discover what you can do to build a better page. Your copy should provide value to prospects before they even visit the landing page.
Hint: By increasing your ad copy/landing page relevancy, you will decrease bounce rate and increase conversions -- thereby increasing your value in ad relevancy to Adwords and increase your ad placement ranking and lowering your PPC cost.
While trying some of these strategies, be sure to experiment with different keyword groups, copy styles, landing pages, timing and budgets. Track performance to see which elements maximize your conversions.
Using PPC to steal customers from your competition is one of the best investments you can make in pay per click. Now, go apply these techniques to pillage and plunger your competition's customers.
