Benchmarking With The Enemy

With the right keywords and the perfect landing page, you are 100% sure that you are ready to launch your online campaign. It can be difficult and devastating to discover that you’re losing in terms of your conversion and that you are paying more in your Adwords. So what can you do in order to survive?

You cannot just stand there and do nothing – use the power of leverage and look at your competition up-close. Sun Tzu in his famous “The Art of War” book wrote the importance of knowing who you are up against. The best way to protect your business is to study how the successful players are protecting their own – know their strengths and weaknesses and adapt their best practices. As they always say – learn from the best but do not copy their strategies because the things that worked well from them may not necessarily mean that it would worked well for you too.

A recent webinar from Jamie Smith of iSpionage reflected the way Convert feels about learning how to benchmark with your enemy of competition. Keep them close so you know when they are doing well and why they are on such level. Keep your eye on every KPI that you can find and try to locate these on your business.

Benchmarking will explain the reason for your campaign performance and it will give you direction on where you need to put your optimization efforts. For Google Adwords user, the benchmarking tool is already installed so all you have to do is to open the tab and review the data comparison of your website to the top players in the industry. By the way, the names of the business are kept-secret so don’t push your luck.

[Tweet “When you benchmark your #PPC campaign, you can reduce your paid traffic cost -@ispionage”]

The Importance of Benchmarking

In an article written by Gregg Hamilton, he mentioned – “conducting search marketing without the benefit of competitive benchmarking is like running a race while wearing blinders – you know you are making progress, but you don’t know if you’re ahead or behind…”

Launching your campaign does not mean that your job is done. Being an online marketer, this only signals the beginning of a more exciting journey. If you want to have a strategic paid search approach – benchmarking is where it all begins. When this practice is in place, you will:

• Have a clear perspective – would you like to continue with what you have or implement change?
• Save on cost – you know where the funds need to go. Do you need to invest on creating a new set of keywords or does your landing page needs an overhaul?
• Make informed decisions – you can set up your own alerts once you reach your lowest point; the sign that it is about time to disengage and perhaps create a better plan.

A PPC campaign without benchmarking is like going on a failed mission – it just won’t work. You will get lost in the battle because you do not know what you are going to do next. Are you in front of the race or are you being left behind? Make sure that you always know why things are working for or against your way – benchmark your way to success! To know more about this KISSmetrics webinar, you can register here.