Advantage in PPC for megaspenders like VistaPrint and Office Depot?

[Ryan_B]

I sell niche printing and office supplies. Our site goes after certain specific keywords, and we use PPC where we compete against small companies such as ourselves, and the mega companies like VistaPrint and Office Depot.  I know about how quality score affects our PPC costs, I was wondering if these huge companies have any other advantage against us in the PPC world.  Does their name recognition give them a quality score of 10 on every keyword they buy? Is there a way to find out what your competition is paying on PPC keywords? Do they have other advantages in PPC that I may not know about?  Thank you so much.

[Branden_S]

Vista Print and Office Depot don't have Quality Score of 10 for all of their keywords...but I imagine they have QS 7-10 for tons of keywords.  They have a huge budget to test things with, many PPC tools (marin, hubspot, mongoose, analytics, omniture, etc) and a team of PPC managers/designers/programmers who have been optimizing their campaigns for years.  They also have a high CTR because of their brand name recognition, which raises their QS.  However you can compete and win!!  You just need to pick your battles.  What are your advantages over Vista and Office Depot?  Higher quality, faster turnaround, local service?  Focus on the areas you beat the big players.  Do you get a lot of business from local companies?  Create campaigns focused on local geography.  If your business is well known in your hometown, Office Max/Vista print don't have an advantage.

QS is the most important long term metric, which is primarily based on CTR.  Create compelling text ads that get people to click them.  Use as many extensions as you can.... site-link, phone extension, location extension, social extension, etc....these all help increase CTR & QS.  When I am trying to increase QS, I only use exact, phrase & broad modified match type...no broad match type.  This will generate more targeted keyword traffic and increase CTR and conversions.  I also use dynamic keyword insertion, which increases CTR & QS.  Also remember that QS is a long term metric, so if you increase your CTR today, you QS will increase in a few weeks/months.

[BrianJGomez]

To echo what John said, the short answer is no.

The longer answer is those guys have their PPC down to an exact science. If they can bring their CPC down a few cents in a month, it likely saves them THOUSANDS of dollars. This means they have smart people who manage their account, looking for every competitive advantage possible.

I would focus on keywords that target advantages that your business (likely better, more customized service) offers so that you aren't on such an uneven playing field.

[john4math]

They don't have an advantage in quality score solely because of their big brand names.  They might have an advantage though for a few reasons:

• People like to click links to big brand names, so their ads probably have a higher CTR than the equivalent ad without a big brand name.  Higher ad CTRs result in higher quality scores.  By no means would I expect all of their keyword quality scores to be a 10.
• They have resources to have a dedicated PPC team or agency, who should be well equipped to optimize their keywords, landing pages, ad text, etc.  Then again, I would imagine they're targeting a lot more queries than you are.

By targeting niche items and queries, your ad text will likely be more specific to users queries than theirs, and hopefully you'll see a higher CTR (and quality score) that way.  Also, make sure you're taking advantage of all the different types of targeting and ad extensions that Adwords offers!

[vagish]

Quality score won't be influenced by the name of the company. I know having the keyword in the title/description and a good CTR can increase the quality score. You can find some information on their AdWords here: Vistaprint and OfficeDepot  and (however I would take that would a grain of salt as I don't know how they actually acquire that information). You can search in different countries and different domains from SEMrush.

Hope this helps!