I want to share some learning experiences, that can help you if you are inexperienced or new to PPC marketing, particularly focusing on competitive intelligence, which is really important in getting set up properly and saving you money over time.

I made a lot of mistakes starting out and this will help you save a lot of time time, research and wasted effort to get you off to a good start.

Overall mindset
Firstly you must be of the mindset that most people are not prepared to do the difficult thing. 80-90% of your results and profitable keywords will come from 10-20% of your campaigns or keywords. Most people give up after a few attempts or failures.

Research, setting goals
Firstly the research phase is vitally important, firstly whatever your offer, whether it be CPA, your own product, you need to pick keywords that will be profitable and earn you more than you pay for over time. You need to work out your ROI and profit margins by keeping an eye on clicks and the value of a conversion.

You also need to think carefully about the buying cycle- what keywords can you bid for that are likely to find people in buying mode and not just in curiosity/problem mode? Compare "I am fat" vs "Best fat burner product"


Here's a simple but powerful formula:
If a site or organisation has kept an ad for a keyword they are bidding on, pretty much the same for the last 6 months, and they are spending a lot of money on it, than it's highly likely the keyword is profitable. Also if you know website or company x is spending 6,000 USD/GBP a month consistently on the same keywords, it's likely these keywords will be making them money (unless of course they have a huge budget and are dumb, but then most companies would not throw money away so callously) of course their offer must be good and having a well designed website is also key to this.

So how do you find this out?
You can simply put in your keyword into Google every day over the course of a week, or use competitive spy tools which can help you save many hours and a lot of money in spend by making informed analysis of their ads and campaigns. For example if you spy on their adspend on keywords, as well as the percentage of traffic being driven by any keyword, these indicators are a huge likelihood that the company or site is making money month by month from them, it's vital competitive PPC intelligence that you would be foolhardy to ignore. Of course their site may also have certain features, and their offer and landing page may be fantastic, hence my point about design being key.

Adcopy of competitors/Quality Score
Good, relevant adcopy is vital to having a good clickthrough rate (CTR) because it increases the number of clicks to impressions (the number of times your ad is shown) and improves your quality score. Quality score is the grade Google Adwords and Bing gives to your keywords and campaigns, the higher the better as it reduces your cost per click (CPC) and makes your bids cheaper, and profits higher. A warning that for certain CPA offers you cannot bid on brand names e.g. if you have a CPA offer on penny auctions, you may not be able to bid on the CPA brand name itself and also you cannot put trademarked terms in your adcopy- e.g. Nike. If you do the first, the CPA network may discount your leads (and in extreme cases suspend your account) in the second case your ad will be disapproved.

Site content relevancy
Another factor related to quality score and how much you pay for CPC is the relevancy of the content of your site. You need to have content that is relevant and has the keywords you are bidding on.

I've written this up in more detail on my site here, including a video demonstration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geU7xHfE7tA


Hope this helps!