Questions you should ask yourself:
Are their ads more compelling? Do they have a sale going on or a new product that is a better version of yours? Does their headline standout more? If you want your company to be able to compete online, regular competitive research is essential.

Benefits of regular competitive research:

• You'll be happily surprised when you see your traffic and sales increasing, if you regularly pay attention to these details to set yourself apart.


• You may also be surprised how little most of your competitors update their own ad text---this will give you the advantage.


• Plus, you will immediately notice when new competitors enter your market---something a company should always know.

Knowing your competition's position and pitch will allow you to give potential clients a better offer so that they will come to your business instead! For more ideas on how to make your company stand out, check out Caitlin Cook's article on creating a unique selling proposition for your company.

Also, a great system for keeping up with your competitive research is to keep a spreadsheet with a tab detailing information on each key competitor. Make note of major ad text changes or ad position changes, with dates, of course, and then look back at the reports for your own account and see how the data correlates.

In summary, staying on top of your competitors through research to make your company stand out can only help grow your business online!

Our goal with this course is to really take you step-by-step through the process of creating and managing campaigns in Google AdWords.

Each session goes for 90 minutes including 20 minutes of Q&A.

The course will teach beginners how to use the AdWords interface to build your Google campaigns from the ground up. You'll learn the essential structures, terminology and all of the many handy facets that can help you better manage, understand and utilize your account's data.

You will learn and gain an understanding of:

• Pay-Per-Click Marketing
• The Google Networks
• Features & Benefits of AdWords
• Key Terminology
• A Proper Account Structure
• The new AdWords Interface
• How to Create a Campaign
• Language & Location Targeting
• Writing Ad Creatives
• Building a Keyword List
• Match Types
• Budgets
• How to Edit Campaign Settings
• How to Optimize Your Campaigns
• How to Create Reports & Understand Them
• How to Use the Many Tools in AdWords
• Bidding
• Other Advertising Options on Google

If you have just started using Google AdWords or would like to grow your business online, but have yet to try, this is just the course for you to get you started.

I manage pay-per-click campaigns on AdWords all day long, every day-of-the-week, so I made sure to cover all of the essentials and give you insider tips to build a well-structured campaign and manage it smoothly.

Please come and join the AdWords Academy boot camp, and get the help you need to make your business soar online or learn more about each training session in detail.

• All three sessions are now available on demand via the All Access Pass.

Not only do you want to ensure ad dominance for your own keywords, but it will help separate these highly performing keywords from everything else, so as not to skew your overall account statistics.

Creating a branded campaign is key to online advertising success as you will want your company to come up when users are specifically searching for your company.

You would want to bid on all versions of your company's name including:

• the correct spelling
• common misspellings
• your company name followed by.com
• your company web address
• your company name with the www. before it

For example, say your company was called Cheesemonger. You would want to bid on the following keywords:

• cheesemonger
• cheesemongers
• chesemonger
• cheesemunger
• thecheesemonger
• www cheesemonger
• cheesemonger com
• www.cheesemonger.com
• www cheesemonger com

Directly bidding on these keywords, means searches are specifically looking for you, so it is important that you don't miss out on this profitable opportunity. Plus, if your company's site is already ranked organically you will show up twice, once in the paid listings and once in the organic listings, which can only help!

Initially you may think, why should I pay for my own keywords if my site is already in the organic listings, but if you show up twice, people will most definitely find your company. Plus, you don't want competitors snapping up your traffic because they are bidding on your branded terms and you are not.

Not to mention, if you are having trouble getting your site to rank on the first page of the organic search results, bidding on your branded keywords is a surefire way to show up.

Typically your branded campaign will get you the cheapest conversions out of any of your campaigns because clearly you must be the most relevant choice if you actually are that company, so you will be paying the least amount for your own terms.

Lastly, you will want to have these terms isolated in a separate campaign so that you can strategically bid for these less expensive terms. If you have your branded terms mixed in with other general terms, you may end up bidding these terms higher than is necessary.

In essence, if people are searching for your specific company name, they want your exact product or service, so missing out on this easy way to make money would just be foolish. Go out and make yourself a branded campaign today!