Understanding the Shopping Ad Auction Environment
Each product search entered into a search engine creates one or more electronic auctions where advertisers bid for available ad slots on the Shopping ad carousel being served to the prospective buyer.
We identify direct and indirect competitors, familiarizing ourselves with their products, services, and positioning in the market. We look at the advertising history, ad copy, ad spend, and market positioning of the most significant online competition.
Reviewing Competitor Product Feed Signals
While reviewing competitor websites and available product feed data, we can examine product feed attribute details. During this process, we gain a level of understanding that is useful in structuring and configuring Shopping campaigns.
Evaluating Product Positioning & Competitive Fit
What we are driving for is both a qualitative and quantitative understanding of the competitive digital advertising environment. We need to understand how your product is positioned against competitors, including your unique selling position and the most effective features, benefits, and characteristics.
This informs our strategy in developing the campaign and allows us to ballpark a daily ad spend recommendation. We use tools to identify average click costs and conversion rates in the sector, vertical, and geo target the campaign will run in, along with other key performance indicators, or KPIs.
Why Online PPC Competition Can Be Different
Search ad campaigns operate in a competitive environment online, which is often different from the actual direct business competition. Often, the same keywords and audience targeting are shared by different vertical markets, services, or products.
This keyword overlap phenomenon strongly impacts many ad auctions. The online competitive environment can be quite different from the offline competitive environment. In PPC, whoever shows up in your auctions is, in effect, a competitor because they are putting pressure on bids.
Setting the Stage for Keyword Research
This step sets the stage for the keyword research process and helps guide campaign structure, product feed review, ad spend planning, and broader PPC campaign management decisions.
