I run a very old site that sells a single service product for about $30 with little service and $70 with more service. Traffic has been coming from SEO for a long time and now I want to add PPC. I have a single, large competitor who sells almost the exact same thing. He has been very successful and SEMrush and Keywordspy say he is spending an average of $900/day and as much as $3000/day on PPC. It must be working or couldn't have kept it up for years. How can I most successfully emulate his strategy? Is there any ethical or other problems with copying his ad text and keywords? What are the best tools to do this kind of thing? Thanks for any advice you can provide.
I don't know a lot about buying PPC campaigns, but I would say the directly copying his ad text would be a huge no-no. Why not target something that make your product unique from his?
How do you really know what he is paying? without seeing his sheet, how do you know what he is spending, making, how do you know he is successful? lots of ads appear, but that does not mean they are successful, however, it is a good sign if he has been there for years..
Good questions. How do I really know what he is paying? I don't. I was looking at a chart on the keywordspy site that shows average daily spend for a given domain. SEMrush had a similar chart and both sites showed the same numbers for the competitors domain. Any idea whether that data is accurate? It might not be accurate but might give a reasonable order of magnitude. And yeah I don't know how "profitable" he really is either. But I've talked to former employees who say the site is generating 60-70k/mth in revenue. And when I see $900+/day spend on PPC I can visualize how the math could all be working out. Also his traffic level seems to hover around 400K hits per month. So in summary I don't know for sure but it looks pretty good from the outside.