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December 10, 2009
Is there a tool or technique to research what keywords a company is bidding on for pay per click (PPC) marketing, aka CPC marketing aka search engine marketing (SEM)? I am trying to research where – and on what terms – a company is using their online advertising dollars and any tips or suggestions would be great.
Thank you.
Yes, you can ask really nicely.
If you have no morals you can spend some time doing impression fraud (refreshing a SERP that shows their ad) until their ad no longer shows, and then try the same thing on your own account with the same word, varying your daily budget until your ad dissappears in roughly the same amount of impressions theirs did. That will give you a very rough idea of their daily budget providing you can estimate their CTR (because AdWords will stop showing an ad when it thinks the number of impressions for this day is going to mean your ad will get clicked on too many times).

The only way to discover what keywords they’re bidding on is to thoroughly research the market (something I will assume you’ve already done if they are your competitors) and then actually search for them. Again, largely hit or miss.
Simply put, the answer is no, there are no tools or shortcuts.
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3 Responses to “Is there a way to find out what a company spends on pay per click and what keywords a company bids on?”
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December 10th, 2009 at 8:11 am
You can not find out how much they are paying. This information is against Google policy. You can get close to what keywords they are using by going to google adwords use the tools, perform a keyword search, there will be an option for finding keywords for a website. Enter the websites address and it will give relevent keywords for that specific site.
References :
December 10th, 2009 at 8:31 am
Yes, you can ask really nicely.
If you have no morals you can spend some time doing impression fraud (refreshing a SERP that shows their ad) until their ad no longer shows, and then try the same thing on your own account with the same word, varying your daily budget until your ad dissappears in roughly the same amount of impressions theirs did. That will give you a very rough idea of their daily budget providing you can estimate their CTR (because AdWords will stop showing an ad when it thinks the number of impressions for this day is going to mean your ad will get clicked on too many times).
The only way to discover what keywords they’re bidding on is to thoroughly research the market (something I will assume you’ve already done if they are your competitors) and then actually search for them. Again, largely hit or miss.
Simply put, the answer is no, there are no tools or shortcuts.
References :
December 10th, 2009 at 9:12 am
Go to this page:
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/srch_pr.php?o=USCJ16&cmp=Affiliate&ctv=CJ&s=A&s2=&s3=&b=25&AID=10280698&PID=2126942
It gives you the number of times a keyword was requested, and another spot gives you the going rate for a specific keyword that you type into the request field.
References :
https://ecommbiz.net/Search_Engines.html