Any kind of marketing operation comprises three key elements. The first is to package your product or service so as to give a good presentation to the public. For internet marketing, a landing page is the major platform for such kind of presentation. It can directly make or kill a campaign. The second step is to find the customers or the right group of people who are interested in your product/service and can be a potential buyer. Carefully choosing your keyword targets is critical for pin-pointing the audience precisely, which can greatly reduce your advertising cost. When you have a good landing page and right targets, the final elements towards a successful campaign is how to handle the competition. For PPV marketing, the battlefield of competition mainly happens at the bidding stage. Now I am going to talk about three stealth bidding strategies that can help you to win the bid war in L
eadImpact.
In Leadimpact, ads are organized by category and sub-category. For the same keyword, the bids in one category usually cannot be seen in another category. However, when LeadImpact decides on which ad to be delivered, it compares all bids globally and gives priority to the highest bid regardless of which category. So this creates one opportunity to do stealth bidding. For example, for a campaign promoting dating offers, you could choose the Lifestyle –> Dating category, which most people will choose; however, you could also choose the Adult –> Dating category, and you can even manage into the Computers and Internet –> Net Communities and Chat category. By choosing the latter two categories, especially the third one, most of your competitors will not be able to see your bid price. You can create a shell campaign under the correct category just for the purpose of monitoring actual bids. In this way, you can bid in a stealth mode.
The second bidding strategy is related to the keyword-matching mechanisms adopted by LeadImpact system. LeadImpact is based on “string” match. Assuming bids are the same, a shorter keyword wins the most impressions. For example, the keyword of insurance is very hot, with lots of competitions. If someone bids on insurance at $0.12, you want to win over his bid. The usual thinking is to increase your bid to $0.13. By doing this, you will receive more traffic; but you will also get two adverse effects. First, increasing bids also increases your cost, which reduces your profit margin. Second, your competitor will see your bid increase; and they will increase their bid accordingly, which will drag everybody into a bidding war. Eventually, there will be no winner. Now remember the “shorter-string-win” principle. Instead of increasing your bid on insurance, you should bid on insuranc – without an “e”. By setting your bid at $0.12, you will be drawing most of the traffic away from the original keyword, and your enemy will not see it. This is the second stealth bidding approach.
The third tactic is to ambush your competitors in temporal domain. This approach is most effective only in a very violent bidding war. When everybody is increasing their bids and using up their daily budget quickly, you better hold your expense at the beginning and wait until their budgets mostly run out. Then, you can join the battlefield to harvest most of the traffic throughout the rest of day, but with a much reduced price. In one word, you need to learn how to take charge in an appropriate time window.