by Kara Ochoa
If you are a KeywordSpy Tracking subscriber and have set up your advertising campaign and currently monitoring your keywords. Here’s a quick quiz to test how your campaign is doing.
Where do you stand? With your current keywords, it’s important to know where you stand in comparison to other websites bidding on the same keywords. Depending on the market or industry, you do not have to be on the top position all the time. With competition coming in and out, it is important to know that your ads, no matter how well-written, are getting the right amount of visibility.
In this case, the Coverage represents visibility of a domain’s PPC Ads on the top rank. If you’re coverage is a bit low, and your ads average position are below 6th rank, you may want to rethink your ad placement. Maybe these competitors are not what you want to go up against on certain periods of the day.
Where can you go? One of the biggest challenges in PPC advertising has to be competition. A saturated market with too much competition leaves minimal opportunity for profit and maximized costs for bids. But it also depends on where your market lies. If you can’t sell by one media, try another. You may want to monitor your keywords and spot where you’re ads are working with proper visibility and where your ads are too flooded with competition that they are not even in the top 10.
There is also the opportunity to spot where else can you take your keyword and build a different market somewhere else. Everyone knows Google, true. But the internet is fast and with the now re-established Bing, you may want to open your eyes for possible developments in the future. Test a few ads in the new neighborhood and see how they fit. If you’re bidding too high on keywords that is not getting you the visibility you need, you might as well try taking your keywords to a different medium.
Who are your Competitors, TODAY? Again, competition flies in and out faster than you can say "competitive intelligence". Your rival website may not be your closest competition overnight. If you find that their website Coverage is dwindling down they may not be worth watching out for. Then again there are also new competitors to your keywords that may not be getting much search engine screen time but may have challenging keywords and ads you can boost your campaigns with. 
What are your Competitors Doing, TODAY? Given that you have given proper thought to your own product and website, it would not hurt to know what else could be done to improve such strategies.
Are you aware of other marketing trends that other advertisers are already taking advantage of? There could be profit opportunities lurking with current trends that are mostly seen that you have not considered yet. Improvement is always necessary, especially when such trends work.
What are you doing wrong? Remember, keywords you get from the market are relative. That means they may be working for one website but depending on your other factors like bid costs and competition, they can do some damage as well.
When a keyword is not performing and you’re still paying for it, its time for pruning.
Done with the quiz? So how well are you really doing?
