Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is often becoming the de facto traffic generating mechanism for people who have the pockets. This, in addition to the fact that Google is really aggressive about its growth in the Indian markets puts Google Adwords right up there in the strategy of any digital marketing executive.
I have been working on the Adwords interface for the past 18 months or so now and get excited whenever I discover a new and useful feature in the web app. One such awesome feature is the single keyword bidding tool.
Where do you find this?
You find this feature in the Keywords interface of any campaign. Be sure that you have enough data points (works for a weekly period for most of my keywords).
The tool is only available if you are selecting one single keyword at any point of time.
There is a small bar graph icon for the keyword bidding tool, now simply select this keyword and view the bidding and competitors.
What can you do with this?
This data is good, but what can one do with this data? Well, this gives you a wealth of information –
- How many people are you competing against (for eg. I did not expect ask.com to be running an ad on this keyword)
- How are you doing vis-a-vis your competitors in SEM (yes, we are beating the crap out of the rest ;-))
- The approximate budget spends of your competitors
- A bit more research on the landing pages can help you identify what your competitors are doing right and you are doing wrong
This is one fun tool that the folks have Google Adwords have churned out.
Economics teaches us that when information is provided to everyone, then the wealth extraction within the market is at a maximum. The adwords bidding is one such great example, wherein me (and all my competitors) have the same access to data. The two players who will end up benefiting the most after the correct usage of this tool are bidders who take fast decision and Google.