Tips to know best adwords keywords of competitors?

[SSS1986]

I am about to run adwords campaign. I have questions-

1. I want to know best adwords keywords that competitors are targetting. Is there any good way to find out the best keywords that competitors use which generate large amount of traffic to them?

2. Can someone guide me how to use adwords in best possible way such as how to pay less and yet receive large number of targeted traffic? Tips are welcome from the community.

I am about to start a campaign for this website which deals with Independent Sales Reps. So the adwords keywords will be related to Independent sales representatives who help in establishing new businesses and exporters.

[EGOL]

What you are asking for (especially #2) requires a lot of time, study and research to accomplish.

So, I recommend that you begin with self-study by getting a copy or "Advanced Google Adwords" by Brad Geddes and reading it carefully twice and practicing the topics as you read.

http://www.advancedadwordsbook.com/

It is really hard to make money in some niches with adwords - especially for common retail items.   To win you must have access to inventory and shipping at very low costs.  If you don't have that you will be eaten alive.

[zpeti]

It isn't very easy finding out the best performing keywords of a competitor, but how about searching for terms you think a visitor would find relevant, and seeing if your competitions shows up for it? Then search for variations on that.

When you create your own campaign, make sure you do phrase matching or exact matching, that's the only way to know how well a certain keywords performs, I've seen google send clicks for completely irrelevant searches for broad match which their algorithms thought was relevant.

[EGOL]

how about searching for terms you think a visitor would find relevant

Doing this alone is great advice.

The best way to assure mediocre performance is to copy a competitor.

[activitysuper]

1. If you use the Google keyword tool, you can search the competitors website, it will supply a list of keywords it thinks is relevant to their website - It's not the keywords they are bidding on but might unlock some potential terms.

Apart from that you could grab some data from something called 'Hitwise' which uses ISP data.

2. Here is the idea - In order to bring your CPC down you need a high quality score, you gain a high quality score through landing page and ad relevance to the keyword combined with a high CTR.

You bid high to start off to gain high positions which gives you a good CTR, this increases quality score and drops your CPC.

Hope that helps a little.

[EricPratum30]

Check out SpyFu. It is bar none the best search ad research tool I use. Beyond that though, performing your own searches, actually going to your competitor's landing pages, and so on can give you a wealth of knowledge about the user experience that tools will not give you.

As far as learning goes, Advanced Google AdWords (which was already mentioned) and the old, but still relevant, Search Engine Marketing would be where I would start.