There are lot of advantages on bidding on your competitor keywords. Bidding on the competition's keywords will give an immediate targeted exposure especially for new websites. New websites find it difficult to make profits from PPC since most of the ads they participate will be costly and they need to pay a hefty amount for it. Bidding on competitor keywords will make that job much easier.
Though Google has a tough stance on bidding on competitor's keywords especially keywords that are Trademarked by the competitor still they don't deny a good user experience. If they feel some thing is good for their users they don't hesitate to do it. As per their policy if a user is satisfied seeing a competitor ad then mostly they allow it. I have personally experienced this when we advertise with Google PPC.
You can also enable benchmarking service for adwords which will allow you to compare your site with competitors.
According to Google Analytics support
"Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website's statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site's Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site's metrics.
This service is located under the "Visitors" section of your reports. Select "Benchmarking (Beta)" to view this report. Please note that it will take up to two weeks for the data to appear since it is being categorized and collected for your reports"
PPC Blog Team
Labels: Adwords, adwords ppc, Analytics, google analytics
