Spy on your competition for 7 days

Just saw an interesting article that proposes a very simple technique for researching your competitor’s AdWords strategy. They essentially suggest picking some key terms that get at least 100 searches per day in Google, then setting up a spreadsheet to track their activity over a period of 7 days.

Here is what you do.

1. Determine the keywords you are going to bid on
2. Go to google.com and type the words in
3. Record the top 10 sponsor results urls in a excel spreadsheet marking date checked, keyword phrase and url.
4. Repeat this process for 7 days recording everything in the excell spreadsheet.

This is an interesting, simple approach. This would definitely be a good starting point for anyone just testing the waters.

But I really have to take issue with some of their research methods. Simply looking up a high-level keyword won’t tell you anything about this competitor’s long-tail approach.

It also suggests using a somewhat unreliable third-party tool in order to do your keyword research.

In my experience, I wouldn’t expect anyone to find any good deals using this testing method. But it is a good way to learn more about your competition, and about AdWords bidding trends in general. Just keep in mind that this is very rough data, and shouldn’t be the basis for your strategy.

Having said that, this is an excellent learning exercise for a beginner.