I know you can see what people are bidding on Overture through their tool and I'm pretty sure Google keeps this data private but is there any way to know what people are bidding on different keywords?
So if that's not an option... Also, I can't seem to find the Overture tool (to see others' bids). Did they move it or does it no longer exist?
There is no way that I know of to see what sites are bidding, or how much a specific site is bidding. However, with a little work, you can figure it out. In your AdWords account, go to the Tools section and use either the "Keyword Tool" or the "Traffic Estimator." You can use these tools to determine what the top and bottom bid are for placement ranges. If you know a site where a competitor is advertising on, go there and see where they rank. Between the two, you should be able to get a good estimate of what they are paying. ** An example of using the Traffic Estimator to determine competitor fees - using the keyword phrase "filet mignon" 1) Enter the keyword phrase in the Traffic Estimator 2) Enter a low (5 cents) Max CPC 3) Choose the geographic area - this you will have to guess at how your competition chooses to advertise 4) On the results, there are two things to look at. The first is the est. ad position and the second is the est. avg CPC. In the first few runs, the est avg CPC won't mean anything (as your bid will be to low for this to change anything). 5) Do the process over again, increasing the Max bid each time. The amount you will want to change the max bid will vary depending on what the first results were. If the first search put you in the 4-6 range, increase by 1-5 cents each time. If you are in the 7-9 or lower range, increase by a higher amount. If you start in the 1-3 range, move to the last step. When you move between placement steps, go back to the amount you put in the time before and increase by smaller amounts to find the specific amount where placement range changes. 6) When you get into the 1-3 range, use a very high max bid. This will give you the end of the range. Example of what I did: I entered "filet mignon" with a max bid of $.05 in the US. The results I got back were est. ave. CPC $.05 and est. Ad Position 4-6. I repeated the process with a max bid of $.10. The results now show est. ave. CPC $.05-.10 and est. Ad Position 1-3. Now, because the ad position range changed, I am going to go back and find the amount at which this changes by doing 1 cent increases (instead of 5) on my max bid. So I now reapeat the process starting at $.06 .06 CPC .05-.06 Position 4-6 .07 CPC .05-.07 Position 1-3 So, $.07 is the bottom of the 1-3 range. Now that I am in the 1-3 range I'll enter a max bid of $100.00. I chose $100 because that is the max bid possible on the estimator tool. This will ensure that my test bid will either be the highest or at leat as high as any other. My new est. ave. CPC is $1.44-1.79 with an est. Position of 1-3. Now I have the lowest and highest CPC for position range 1-3. .07 to 1.79 Somethings to take into account, the CPC is not the same as the bid amount. You may have to bid significantly higher than the actual cost in order to get the top position. Also, these are estimates and rely on your interpretive skills to derive meaning. So, how do I determine how much a competitor pays? If you know some sites that their ads appear on, you can figure it out with a little effort. (Note, this only works if the ads are contextual. If they are site-based ads, then I don't know.) Go to the site and look at several pages and get a feel for where their ads place. Given the numbers that I have, if their ad never gets above 4, then I know they are paying less than $.10 (possibly less than $.07). If their ad is always number 1, then they pay very close to $1.79 per click (on average). A few flaws are inherent with this method. You may or may not know for sure whether your competitor targets the exact keywords/phrase for their campaign. In addition, the site(s)/page(s) that you use to research competitor placement may not target the exact words/phrase you are looking at. The easiest way to get around this is to buy a cheap .info domain and develop some pages that target the specific keyword(s)/phrase you are interested in. Also, this method is easier to use when there are few enough advertisers that their ads show up regularly. Also, check placement at several times during the day. A person that shows up as #1 from morning to night pays at the highest rate. A person that shows up #3 but only in the afternoon might only be showing up because everybody else's daily limit has been reached already. Not a perfect method, but if you do enough leg work, you should get a reasonable estimate. On the other hand, you could just do what you can afford and to heck with other sites....
i dont think you can do that with Adwords. You have to make some research and experiments/test sometimes.
The above method doesn't work because ad position isn't based just on the amount bid, but the CTR rate. Google would rather show a 25 cent bid that gets clicked than an ad bidding $1 which no one clicks. Then there is the quality score of an ad. You can have the number one ad paying 25 cents and the number 10 position paying $1. Overture is no longer showing the top bid amounts and is moving towards a system like adwords.
Like I said, there are some inherent issues with the method. But you can get a ballpark estimate that should be fairly accurate outside of niches filled with MFA sites.
nice @ druidelder, great tips. how about giving more tips about how you optimized your landing page/s
Yes, it is different because of the quality score. Yes, it is different because of the CTR. You can't get an exact number. Unless there is another alternative that somebody else would like to suggest, that is the closest approximation you can get as I see it. To be the most accurate, you have to do a little homework and make some educated guesses as to what those might be. TatiAnA - We do not use AdWords to advertise our site. In fact, we do very little in the way of advertising. However, that is mainly because our site has a virtual lock in our niche (topic and geographic specific). Thus, we do not have an AdWords landing page. At this point, I only use AdWords for the tools and to help us understand how we can best manage our AdSense campaign.
Who cares what other people are bidding... 1. Knowing what they are bidding wouldn't help you. 2. Even if you could find out someone's bid bids are not static - they are adjusted all the time. 3. Knowing what other people are bidding won't help you. If you want an inaccurate estimate use the AdWords estimator tool. If you want to know how much you will have to bid set up a live campaign with a small budget and test the waters. You can't detemine what others are bidding with any degree of accuracy and even if you could it would do you no good.