Beating The Competition

From Adylitica

If a competitor is vying for your keywords, which they likely are, there are a variety of ways to beat them to the conversions.

Increase bidding

This is the most obvious way to beat a competitor to conversions: throw money at the problem. It may not sound like the most fun way to win, but increasing bids will improve position rank which will improve clicks which ought to increase conversions.

But actually, if you are using an ideal CPC setting, this is not an issue, because you should already set your bidding to the highest maximum setting that makes business sense. Google will automatically save you money if other people's bids are lower and adjust your real CPC to just slightly higher than their highest bid.

Action: determine the highest CPC that makes business sense by comparing CTR to conversions.

Increase quality score

Quality score is maybe of equal importance to CPC settings, and something where the main investment required is time. Setting ad groups to be tightly targeted to the audience will lower real CPC and improve impression share.

To beat a competitor's quality score, break up ad groups and use trial and error to determine optimal quality ad groups. Adjust CPC based on individual ad groups versus conversions.

For more on improving quality score see Improving quality score.

Find new keywords

Find uncontested turf to run campaigns against.

Don't flood existing ad groups with new keywords, instead create new ad groups customized against potential keywords.