Market Awareness

From Competitive Pricing to Competitive Advertising: How to Execute a Competitive and Profitable Online Ad Strategy

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This is a guest post by Jana Fung, Marketing Manager at MixRank.

Pricing is just one part of the 4 P’s of the marketing mix. There’s also product, place and promotion. Since you already have the product and pricing strategies down pat with WisePricer’s industry leading competitive pricing tool, I will discuss some pointers on how to competitively promote and place your product with competitive advertising.  Creating an ad for your product can take on many forms whether it’s a digital ad, a print ad, a radio ad, a massive billboard, or even a direct marketing campaign. For ecommerce businesses, online advertising has a proven track record of reaching the right audiences and obtaining profitable traffic, so this post will focus on online advertising campaigns.

For online ad campaigns, placement and promotion go hand in hand, as both ads and targeting are variables you can test for campaign performance.  While some placements and ads will bomb, others will cash in. Your competitors, who have been at this for years, have a huge advantage over you because they already know what sites and ad copy performs well, based on their years of testing.

Today, we’ll discuss a new strategy that leverages big data competitive intelligence tools to automatically identify your competitors’ online advertising successes and failures so you don’t have to waste multiple months and thousands of dollars on testing. I’ll cover the strategies that will help you succeed with competitive promotion and competitive placement to complete your marketing mix.

Competitive Promotion: Pay per click (PPC) campaigns can be text or banner ads.  Here are a few ways you can stand out from the competition, create ads that sell and obtain the most relevant clicks back to your site.

  • Identify what ad copy’s successful for your competitors: By using competitive intelligence tools like MixRank, you can see the ads from your top competitors and learn from their mistakes.  Determine on how successful the ad has been based on the number of times an ad has been seen, or the length of time the ad has been actively running. Here’s how to locate your competitors’ ads within an advertiser report in MixRank:

  • Exploit the price in the ad copy: Adding a price will either entice clicks from interested prospects or it will drive away those who don’t want to spend that much, helping ensure you only receive the most relevant traffic back to your site.
  • Include clear, visible and only one call to action: Increase the relevancy of your ad by explaining what will happen if someone clicks on it.  A clear and visible call to action like click here to purchase, drives more profitable clicks and weeds out those who are not ready to purchase.
  • Leverage dynamic campaigns (text ads only): Dynamic text or dynamic keywords can be leveraged within AdWords or Bing Ads to increase relevancy to the search query.  Not only will your ad be more relevant to the keyword that was queried, your cost per click (CPC) should go down with a higher click through rate (CTR) and Quality Score.

Competitive Placement: There are several targeting options you can use on AdWords or Bing Ads but competitive placement of ad targeting is best used with precision.  Here are some tips to make sure your ads are reaching the right audiences.

  • Steal competitors traffic:  With spy tools like MixRank, you can you see exactly where your competitors are buying traffic. Based on the number of Times Seen and length of time the placement has been targeted is a powerful indicator of whether the placement is sending profitable traffic or not. See the image below to find out how to get the list of profitable sites within seconds.
  • Target competitors keywords: Placement targeting is great, but within many ad networks, you can add another layer of targeting that targets your ad with even more precision towards the right eyeballs.  You can easily export your competitors’ keywords within a MixRank ad or advertiser report. Simply click on the Keywords section, as noted in the image below:

 

  • Add negative placements and keywords: If you’re participating in topic or interest targeting, your ad could show up on other sites beyond the placements you’re targeting.  With MixRank, you can see all of the sites and keywords a competitor tested. So for keywords and sites that were only targeted for a few days many months or years ago, add those as negative placements and keywords so you don’t waste any ad spend on unprofitable audiences.

The marketing mix wouldn’t be complete without the 4 P’s: product, price, place and promotion. Make sure you’re implementing the marketing mix intelligently and competitively with the top competitive intelligence tools available, like WisePricer and MixRank.  Try MixRank now to start executing competitive pricing in competitive ads.

About the Author

Jana Fung, guest author of this post, is the Marketing Manager of MixRank– a spy tool for contextual and display ads. She has managed successful demand generation programs for over 6 years. She is optimistic about the growth of online advertising and has a passion for helping online marketers with their campaigns. If you’re a MixRank fan or just want to say hi, she’s interested in connecting with you! Follow her on Twitter @jana_fung

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