PPC marketing in a high competitive Niche

Have you always wondered how difficult it is to enter a busy niche market with a new website and PPC traffic? The main assumption would be that a) you have to deal with many competitors and b) with very high bid/click prices. How would one approach such a niche and build a PPC campaign that does not drain your financial budget, but delivers good results so that you can withstand the initial loss you might have to accept until Google Adwords rates your PPC campaign and website trustworthy.

I have been doing a lot of research in a specific niche market and wondered how these people do it. Page #1 of the Google results always shows ads of the same 6-10 players in this field. Only one or two are linking to the actual product. 4 are linking to a main website with no product information, but more generic information about the market/products. These are review websites. The remaining competitors are using the “Scam” approach, by warning the visitor of possible scams out there and then try to convince them that the remaining product they describe is the golden egg.

I have been following this for 10-15 days now and I have to say it seems like either way must be working. Clicks in this market must be from around $0.75 (established campaign with good CTR and awesome quality scores) to $1.50 (new website/new CTR). The keywords I have used to monitor are pretty generic and should generate quite some traffic. So, my overall impression is that the different ways to approach customers seem to work for these people. Certainly worth diving more into that market to see if I can enter it without bleeding money too much before I start earning money. Certainly a good niche to try the long tail first and then to start competing with the big guys when already seeing some cash flow.

Here are the steps I did to monitor this market.

• Identify the niche and the different products
• Find 20-30 generic keywords to monitor
• Identify the different competitors
• Monitor their ads and their ad position
• Identify their approach to sell the product
• Collect the data and make it readable to be able assess and to come to a conclusion

Once you have some real data to work with, you can decide if you want to take the risk to enter this market. If you do, don’t reinvent the wheel. Pick a strategy matching what the top players are doing. Build a website and ads following that strategy. Now comes the difficult part – you need to find out what converts. This requires you to spend some money. Pick the generic keywords that generate a lot of traffic and enter the market with high bids. You want ad impressions and you want people to come to your website. Use something like crazyegg.com to track where visitors click on your pages. Use Google Analytics or any other good stats program to monitor traffic flow. Spend a couple hundred bucks if necessary to optimize your website and to swap products around if needed. In my case the affiliate commission is between $15 and $35 per conversion (broad range as I do not want to hand out which niche I am playing in right to avoid more competition) . I know that this is the difficult part that involves some risk, but if you don’t try you will not be able to succeed.

Here are some niches you could explore and see if you want to give it a shot:

• Diet and Weight Loss
• Credit Card offers
• Mortgage offers
• Colon Cleansing
• Debt Relief
• Cash Advance
• Beauty
• Shopping

There are certainly more niches to play in, but those here have offers at many different affiliate networks.