Welcome to your source for competitive PLA offers!

Bookmark this page and return daily to see updates of Google’s most popular PLA Special Offers.

Keeping your PPC offers competitive and relevant is essential.  Armed with the right offer intelligence, it becomes easier to create compelling offers (that stand out from the competition), improve your clickthrough rates, and drive sales. But how can you use offer monitoring effectively for brand protection?

Ad monitoring data is a great place to start for this. It gives you the scale and coverage that you can’t get from manual searches.

The holiday bundle gives retail advertisers five essential ad monitoring services to stay ahead of competitors:

1. OFFER MONITORING:  Learn from competitors’ offers, incl. PLA Special Offers, & quickly remove unauthorized offers. learn more
2. PRICE MONITORING:  Provide a list of SKUs to see competitive prices for your products. learn more
3. ORGANIC MONITORING:  Monitor competitors’ organic listings for multiple engines/geographies. learn more
4. PLA MONITORING:  See the brands and retailers appearing with you and adjust ads accordingly. learn more
5. MAP COMPLIANCE:  Identify Minimum Advertised Price violations and unauthorized re-sellers. learn more

Lesson 1 | Brand Protection Crash Course

Lesson 1: Why is PPC brand protection important?

Unless you are entirely new to PPC, getting the significant gains we once saw is tough. PPC has matured as a marketing tactic for years, and few “easy wins” remain. Many categories are dominated by prominent players (e.g., Amazon), long-tail keywords have become expensive, and the most advanced marketers have complex technology and costly agencies.

Especially with first-page CPC bids on the rise, it can be tempting for advertisers to look for any opportunity to reduce costs, and sometimes branded campaigns get the ax.

‘No-Brainer’

Geo-targeting ads is a ‘no-brainer’ for search marketers. It makes sense to tailor your ad copy, offer, and landing page for the user’s location. The ability to see how your marketing partners and search competitors behave by zip code, city, country, and even language give incredible insights into what is happening in the market, and the ability to adapt your strategy accordingly. But geo-targeting has other, often-overlooked applications in the world of search marketing.

Unexpected Benefits

Not only does it make your offer more compelling to the customer, but also conveys the feeling that this company understands me and the things I care about. Seeing a localized ad that ties in with local knowledge and cultural aspects I care about, means I am more likely to have a feel-good factor about the brand and their willingness to connect with me. This ‘customer-centric’ approach to marketing is not new, it’s been utilized in marketing for a long time, but in modern, scalable digital marketing has sometimes been lost in the day-to-day grind for more clicks and conversions. So not only can Geo-targeting your products and offers help secure more customers, it can also give additional softer marketing benefits that cannot be overlooked.

If you have a brand worth protecting, competitors are already bidding on your brand name. Some bid directly on your name, while others will bid on obvious derivatives, such as when Marketo bids on phrases like “Pardot drip marketing” (and vice versa). Many large brands have competitors bidding to every available ad position for every imaginable brand and brand-plus keyword.

The question is, what can you do to deal with competitors brazenly showing up on your hard-earned name? Your best options include:

If you sell online, having an affiliate program can help you dominate page one, drive more revenue, manage costs, and build your brand. By carefully selecting a group of your best affiliates to work with you, you can use this powerful cost-cutting technique that can also boost clicks and sales.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into tactics that will help you better control the search engine results and your CPC prices by coordinating your brand bidding with partners and affiliates. Here are the basics:

The Search Monitor recently conducted a survey to aggregate performance metrics for shopping campaigns on Google, Bing and Amazon. 

Content Monitoring is an increasingly common practice where advertisers learn how partners, competitors, and other websites use their marketing content online. Typically, content monitoring relies on automated web crawling technology to look for specific instances of other advertisers behaving badly.

You may ask…do advertisers really behave badly? Short Answer: Yes.

The Search Monitor Now Monitors South Korea’s Naver Search Engine

The Search Monitor is excited to add South Korea’s Naver, one of the world’s leading search engines, to its list of monitored media. This list includes Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL, Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia), and the PriceGrabber and ShopZilla shopping engines.

Naver was started in 1999 to provide more relevant Korean-language results for South Korea’s consumers. And 16 years later, it is still the king of the market, with 50% market share compared to Google’s 37% share. After these two giants, the next biggest search engines only have single-digit market share.