Richard Stokes is the president and founder of AdGooroo as well as the author of the excellent new book "Mastering Search Advertising:  How the Top 3% of Search Advertisers Dominate Google Adwords". In this exclusive article he wrote for the RSS Ray blog, Rich discusses how to use competitive intelligence to research keywords, conduct search engine optimization, and even protect your trademarks.

Most likely, your fiercest competitor already knows your top keywords, has studied your latest campaign statistics and monitors your landing pages. They also may be hijacking your trademarked terms in violation of search engine’s trademark infringement rules.

Frightening? Yes, when you consider that they’re likely capitalizing on much of your hard work, but what do you know about them?

Competitive intelligence (CI) is essential in search advertising. Without it, marketers risk ineffective keywords, poorly developed ad copy and ultimately lost business.  But, marketers easily and cost-effectively can regain their competitive advantage. As economic conditions and the general evolution of marketing drive more dollars to search and the Web in general, the stakes will continue to rise.

Understanding Intelligence 
With competition already intense and only expected to increase, the question isn’t whether to practice CI, but which CI tools to use?

CI is not a purchase to make lightly. Besides cost, the decision is complicated by a market cluttered with options and marketers who don’t truly understand CI.

In part, CI is about understanding your competitors, but, the real gain is insight into your business practices. While some CI applications track competitors’ keywords and landing pages, they also help marketers improve ad copy, identify seasonal trends, monitor pay-per-click statistics and fix campaign issues.   

But not all CI tools perform these tasks.

As the leading provider of CI to search engine marketers in the world (35 of the top 50 agencies and such leading brands as Southwest Vacations, Target and Turtle Wax), AdGooroo offers a comprehensive suite of tools which includes SEM Insight, Trademark Insight and AdGooroo Express.

These tools track all search advertising activity in any given industry, empowering sophisticated agencies and advertisers with competitors’ top keywords, ad copy, campaign statistics, daily alerts and other information needed to generate the highest possible return on advertising investment – and provide the much-desired competitive advantage.  Here’s how AdGooroo’s tools targets competition.

Elements of CI
Keywords
Learning what keywords your competitors are targeting may be your best source of competitive advantage in online advertising. Advertisers with larger keyword lists win more traffic at a lower cost per visitor than their competition.

Why?

Search engine users tend to type in specific, 2-4 word phrases to find what they’re looking for. When your targeted terms match what they’re looking for, your ads are shown more prominently and receive a higher click-through rate than the ads targeted to more general terms.

Furthermore, because most online advertisers tend to target broad, generic terms, there are fewer competitors for these longer, more specific keyword phrases. This translates into a lower cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion when using these long tail keywords.

AdGooroo’s SEM Insight researches the exact phrases that drive the most traffic to your competitors’ Web sites, allowing you to increase targeted traffic and lower your cost-per-acquisition.

Here’s an example. For one Web site, the broad search term "spyware" results in a $3.01 cost-per-lead. The more specific phrase, "spyware remover," results in a cost-per-lead of only $1.96. For this Web site, the savings on this one term alone is more than $20 per day. The entire portfolio of 343 specific terms results in a total savings of about $12,200 per month for those leads generated by this campaign.

In his book, Mastering Search Advertising: How the top 3% of search advertisers dominate Google AdWords, Rich Stokes, AdGooroo founder and chief Gooroo, delves further into keyword research, including insights on rules of thumb for setting initial bid prices for new keywords, how to increase traffic and managing bids without expensive software.   

Trademark Infringement
Another element of competitive intelligence is trademark infringement. Yet, even among search insiders, many don’t understand it well or the steps to mitigate losses.

Marketers first need to understand the rules. Each of the leading search engines allow marketers to bid on competitors’ trademarked terms but prohibit the use of these terms in the actual ad copy. So Kohl’s can bid on the term Target and Target can bid on the term Kohl’s, for example, but neither can use the other’s trademarked terms in their ad copy.

Although the rules are clear, marketers often don’t feel an urgency to act. Many seem to think the engines will tackle these rule violations on their behalf or avoid it entirely because they find the task overwhelming.  Whatever the reason, marketers often don’t see the urgency to protect their trademarks in search.

First and foremost, marketers risk losing a customer that actively sought them out. We’re talking about the brand as a keyword here; so any resulting ads get triggered by the user entering the marketer’s trademarked term.  

This is detailed well in Eric Enge’s October 14, 2008 post in Search Engine Land on Trademark Protection Using AdGooroo.

Beyond the loss in sales, traffic and brand equity a marketer stands to lose, the rightful owner of the trademarked term also risks setting up a consumer for a bad experience or permanently losing that customer to a copycat site.

If trademark infringement is suspected, the marketer needs to identify the culprits and file paperwork directly with the search engines to order the violator to cease and desist. Once documentation and paperwork has been submitted, Google, Yahoo!, MSN and the other engines will take action to address the advertisements in violation of the trademark usage policy.

Automated tools, such are as AdGooroo’s Trademark Insight simplify the process. Trademark Insight monitors all search engine advertising on a 24/7 real-time basis and alerts marketers to unauthorized trademark use. It will even automatically generate infringement complaints ready for submission to the search engines!

Catch the full interview with Richard Stokes today at 6:00 PM Eastern, 3:00 PM Pacific on Online Marketing with RSS Ray.