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Adwords Competition research
Introducing Adsnatcher
Ok guys, I have been working on this for about the last 4 months, and its almost ready for public consumption, although still not quite yet. So I am going to give you an adsnatcher tutorial in avi format here, and an adsnatcher tutorial in Flash here. These are videos that explain how this script works.
They video is about 18 minutes long, and in both formats runs about 35 megs, so if you don't have broadband you are kind of out of luck. Here is the secret of adsnatcher......
I also made an adsnatcher tutorial version in windows media format, that runs 9 megs, but I really recommend the first two as windows media format really is lame,
but for a dialup user, it will have to do.
I built this script to use with Adwords clients for campaigns we manage as my own personal secret weapon. Franky I kind of want to keep it that way, but my partners want to release this to people to use, for free, and who knows, maybe turn this into an adsense supported free app, a commercial app, or whatever. Here is the secret:
Ok so what is adsnatcher all about? How does it work?
Adsnatcher works on the most simple principle you can think of which is this:
People that are advertising a lot, over a long period of time, with Google Adwords are either crazy, or they are making money.
That's the long and the short of it, if you want to know the truth.
Here's the down and dirty way to use it, followed by a little more lengthy explanation for those people who need to answer the question, why does it work?
The down and dirty quick way to use adsnatcher
The campaign detail page:
1) Go to the campaigns page. You will find a few different campaigns for a number of different industries there. Click on any campaign/industry that interests you.
2) You will see on the left the main keyword(s) of that industry, and on the right the ads and advertisers sorted by "coverage", which simply means how often throughout the day that particular ad is showing up.
3) From this point, if that campaign has more than one keyword in it, you can click on that keyword on the left and see a detail of the advertisers for just that one keyword.
4) Regardless of whether you are looking at a campaign page or the keyword page, the data is presented the same. You will find all the ads listed in order of coverage, along with their average position. You can then change the dropdown box to view the data for the past 7 days, the past 30 days, or the past 90 days.
If you see the same advertisers in all 3, then you know that they are top competitors, because their ads are showing up very consistently. It means either they are stupid, a fortune 500 company, or a smart advertiser.
If you scroll below, this information is put onto a graph, which shows visually where most of the competitors are at. Look first, to the coverage column. The top competitors in any market will be close to 100 percent. After you have identified the top competitors in terms of coverage, look at their position. Position 0 means they are actually above the "regular" search results and are highlighted, which means for sure Google likes that ad and it is getting a high click through rate, but just because a person is number 1 does not mean they are smart.
Especially look for some competitors that are showing close to 100% of the time, down in positions 6,7,8. This means that they are enjoying a very low cost per click compared to the other guys, and buying all the traffic at that price they can get their hands on. This is definitely cause for more investigation.
Once you find an an ad headline that interests you and is getting high coverage, click on it, and you will get to an ad detail page.
The ad detail page
5) Once you have identified who is an interesting advertiser and clicked on their ad, you will get to the ad detail page, which gives you the keyword that was searched at Google, the ad headline and body text, the display url, which is the url that is displayed in the Google Adwords ad, and the actual url, which is where they are really sending their traffic to.
If you see that they are using a tracking url, like http://www.mysite.com/?=uheiiuhawr+llihe&oiweroiajf or whatever instead of just www.mysite.com, you have further evidence that they are a sophisticated advertiser and they are tracking their results.
There are a couple other goodies added just for fun here, neither sites of which adsnatcher has any relation to. But since these other sites approach this research in a different way, we just embedded a link to make it easy to research your smart advertisers a little easier.
Url trends updates a database once a month with alexa rank, link popularity in the big 3 search engines, Google pagerank, trends of these links, and also gives information about their possible links in furl, delicious, and icerocket, which gives you a snapshot about the overall power of the site you are researching.
Additionally, you have a link to googspy, which takes a larger number of keywords, but doesn't query Google as often, so you can find other sites advertising on that same term, but more importantly, find other possible terms your competitor may be advertising on so you can add them to your account.
The other keywords that you sometimes find listed below this are the additional terms that googspy found.
So there you have it. In just a few seconds you identified the probable best ads for any given keyword, and found the top competitor for that keyword or industry, analyzed their site further, and possibly identified additional keywords that you didn't think of. Yes you could have found all this information on your own, but it would have taken a lot of Google searches over an extended period of time to find this information, and time is money right?
MORE INFORMATION FOR PEOPLE THAT ARE CRAVING TO KNOW
Why does adsnatcher work? Why should I check it as an advertiser?
Lets get into what this means for you as a potential advertiser. How do you identify your competition and beat them at their own game? How do you find out who is really the dominant player in a market that you are researching?
What adsnatcher does, is it takes a keyword you are interested in, goes and searches Google with that keyword, then takes all the ads, noting what position those ads are in, and puts them in a database. It does this with a lot of keywords, then when the cycle is complete does it all over again.
Once a week, Adsnatcher crunches the numbers and sorts all these ads by their "coverage" which is how often the same ad appears over and over again.The highest possible coverage you can get is 100%, which means that every time we come to Google searching that keyword, we see the same ad in the same position. Over time, this means those advertisers are either very rich and stupid, or very rich and smart.
By looking at both their coverage and position, you can then determine which it is. Once you have the top competitors and ads, there are a couple other tools included to rapidly analyze that "smart advertiser" to see what they are doing right, see what ads are really doing well, and get additional keywords you might not have thought of.
In Adwords the whole amount of data people usually look at, is all within their own account. They look at how their ads are doing, how much the advertising is costing them, and trying to improve. But your own account could be one of thousands of advertisers out there and you need to have a picture of the whole market and what ALL the advertisers are doing, for you to make the best possible decision.
Many of the keywords in Google have thousands of advertisers, and depending on their budgets, are rotated throughout the day at Google. It is possible that you might have a really killer account and some ads that are the ultimate, that might not show up as high coverage because your advertising budget is 10 dollars a day and your ads are only showing up here and there.
Google rotates your ads throughout the day depending on your budget, plus the quality score of your ad. So if your budget is 100 dollars, and the term gets searched on a lot, your ad, along with thousands of other advertisers will be shown throughout the day, but may get only a small percentage of the possible ad impressions that are available.
So adsnatcher can miss some of the potentially good ads out there that are getting great click through rates. BUT, most of the time, when someone gets their site conversions up, their ads are working, and they start making money, they up their budget to the maximum. When you are making $100 from every 200 visitors, it makes sense to make $1000 from 2000 visitors instead, which is what most people do, until they hit the maximum of Google traffic they can get, which is different for any given keyword. Then they look for other keywords.
Hundreds of new advertisers enter the keyword market for your keywords each week, and the vast majority of them fail.
But there are some advertisers you see in the same place, every day, for years. They must be something right. Especially the ones that are not fortune 500 companies but small web businesses. They don't have huge fortunes to draw from, so their advertising must make a profit for them, or they wouldn't keep advertising.
You don't need adsnatcher. All you have to do is just take a list of all your keywords, search Google one by one, clear the cookies from your browser, and do it all over again, all day and all night, for about 2-3 weeks. You'll know who your top competitors are, and what their best ads are. Adsnatcher just does all the grunt work for you, and lets you do this for all the different industries that it monitors, so you can have a life for a change.
HOW TO IDENTIFY THE REAL PLAYERS IN ANY MARKET
Ok listen up- here is what the real Adwords pros know. The real players in any keyword market usually have the following characteristics:
1)They usually are constantly split testing different ads
2)They usually show up with the highest coverage out of all the advertisers, meaning their ads are showing a lot
3)They aren't in the number 1 position most of the time.
To understand why, lets do a little math. Lets say that you are a mortgage broker, and you want to buy the keyword "mortgage", and you figure that having a great ad and being number 1 is where its at. but your budget is 200 bucks a day. I am also going to assume that there are 100,000 people searching for the word "mortgage" at Google each day for the purpose of this exercise.
So if your budget is 200 bucks a day, and you have a fantastic ad that has a 3% Click through rate, and you are willing to pay 20 dollars a click to be number 1 (although your average actual cost per click is 5 dollars in your particular account) you now are going to be able to get 40 clicks a day at 5 bucks a click. Not bad.
But look at this, Google has 100,000 potential clicks you could get. And you got 40.
Now lets say you are going to let someone else be number 1, you are shooting for position 6, and now your 3% click through rate ad in position 6 costs you $2.50 a click instead of the $5.00 you are paying. Bingo. This means you doubled your traffic, for the same advertising cost.
In the real world it doesn't work out exactly like that, because with Google, that $200 advertising budget is actually part of your "quality score" You will have to raise your budget, until it eventually gets up to the maximum allowed, in order to get your share of those clicks. And also the higher the position, the easier it is to get good click through rates. But the basic principal is this:
If you increase your advertising budget, make better ads than your competition, and reduce your cost per click, you will find the your sweet spot for the lowest possible cost per click, and the most possible clicks. By further optimizing your website for the highest possible conversion, you will dominate your market.
And adsnatcher will then find you.
Submitted by steveblom on Thu, 2005-05-12 15:48.
adwords software | free stuff
The Adwords combiner:
A rediscovered tool:
http://Adwordstips.com/mergekeywords/combine.cgi?boxes=3
In my video series I show how to use this tool, but it is pretty simple. You can use this to make unique phrases by taking your existing keyword lists and adding another word to rotate in, or take 3 different words or two different words. (In that case use this link: http://Adwordstips.com/mergekeywords/combine.cgi?boxes=2. )
It also generates all the google match types for you quite nicely. Every once in a while I lose this link and it is hard to find at Google. then I have to go into my own materials to find it again. If anyone wants to make this script for me in PHP I will pay you big dollars and make you irresistable to women.
A lot of times you might generate a bunch of phrases that don't get any clicks after 30 days or so at google, in which case I recommend killing them, but by adding misspellings and different combinations you can sometimes get a "nugget of gold" that you can't find at Wordtracker or Overture.
If you are not a programmer have fun with it. If you are a programmer call me.
Submitted by steveblom on Tue, 2005-04-19 01:15.
adwords competition analysis | adwords software
Adwords Competition Analysis Tools -Adsnatcher review
Continuing on this theme of testing web based software for adwords competition research, I want to talk about adsnatcher for a bit, since I already talked about adgooroo.
adsnatcher is MUCH cheaper, letting you monitor 500 keywords for 60 bucks a month, and it does give you a lot of the same competitive data that adgooroo does. The only thing, you can still extract this competitive data if you can live with broken links, links that go to wierd places, and strange server messages from time to time. adsnatcher has a LONG way to go. But the difference in price is still amazing and I am definately interested in wrestling with it because of the price difference.
monitoring 500 keywords in adgooroo would cost you something like 2000 bucks a month, so this is significant.
And really the data is the same. What it measures is every certain interval, the software goes out to the keyword you pick and grabs all the ads and puts them in a database and stores the data. That's it. But what you can do with the data is quite substantial if you are a pro. For instance, if you constantly monitor a keyword for 30 days and you see the same guy with the same ad in the same position, 100 percent of the time, you know he's making money. You know the ad is working. So then you can go investigate further, look at his sales process, see what other keywords he shows up in and grab all of his ads and look at them. You can compare them to yours, adjust your ads accordingly, and then look at the site and the sales process, and learn a heck of a lot in a short period of time.
Adgooroo has a pdf that explains the philosophy and is 14 pages, but really is worth the read. Competition analysis definately looks different after reading this one.
I am still testing both of these services each day and I will give my definitive opinion at the end of this month.
Submitted by steveblom on Thu, 2005-04-14 18:34.
adwords competition analysis | adwords software | competition analysis software | making money with adwords
New Adwords Competition Analysis BOMB!
In an earlier post I was talking about two new things I am testing, web based softwares for adwords competition research, and after only 3 days I already have a hands down winner.
The two services I have been trying out are Adgooroo and adarchiver.
Adgoooro is much more expensive than adarchiver, costing you 2 dollars per keyword per month, with an intro package of 50 keywords for 50 bucks. They only give you a 5 day free trial with 10 keywords, which is barely long enough to learn their system. But they have a slick interface, and their programming works very well. Adarchiver on the other hand will let you monitor up to 500 keywords a month for 60 bucks a month so its a lot more cost effective. But their interface isn't that professional and some of the code is a little buggy. I am ponying up dollars to both places and I am going to give them each a full 30 days before I really declare the real winner. I hope adarchiver pulls through because its a lot cheaper, but we will see.
So what do these adwords software tools do for your competition analysis? Why am I so excited?
In a nutshell, they go every 30 minutes or so and take a "snapshot" of all the competition on the first page of Google Search results, grab all the ads, and their positions, and then do the same thing for all the keywords you want 24 hours a day.
Now here's where it gets interesting.
In any given market it is usually only 3 or 4 advertisors you really have to worry about, which is usually about 10% of all the advertisors out there.
Or put it another way, if somebody is advertising on a certain keyword and you see them up there at number 6 every day, every hour for 30 days, they are either making money, or they are crazy. If they are in position 6 or 7all the time they are probably pretty smart. If they are in position 1 all the time they are probably pretty rich.
Now if you are smart, you will go find those guys and look at all of their winning ads for the keywords you have chosen and learn something. You can also go look at their website, sign up for their newsletter, and observer their whole sales process.
Then all you have to do is be just a hair better than them with your ads, and you can beat them and make money in that area too.
There's more to it than that, but that's the gist of it. You will learn more by messing around with the free trial they have at adgooroo.com
I am only 3 days into my testing but I am already pretty impressed, The caveat I have is you have to pick the RIGHT KEYWORDS to monitor or the tool won't tell you the truth. Also both companies are in California so depending on where they are monitoring the data from, the results might favor people doing campaigns only in California area. But there is still some great competition analysis data to be had.
It took adarchiver support a whole day and a half to update my account from the trial to the "big mama" so I am not thrilled so far, but the data they gather is the same for a lot less, so I am continuing with the research and I will post the winner 27 days from now.
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