Most people want to know how to find the amount of traffic and the amount of money their competitors are getting and spending in advertising on Google. Unfortunately, there is no 100% guaranteed way to do this, but is a general way that you can use to get a good idea.

The First Step is to use Google’s traffic estimator tool (this is different from their keyword tool) to see how much traffic your competitor is getting for the keywords they are using. You do need to know the keywords they are using so you can either search for similar keywords or use a product like SpyFu. Once you have some keywords go to Click Here and enter the appropriate information and search to see the traffic levels for those keywords.

The Second Step is to find what they’re paying for their text ad. Google gives each website domain a Quality Score and most of the time that quality score stays with that domain regardless of the account it’s advertised in. This means that if you create the same exact text advertisement as this person and use the same keywords, you should have a similar quality score. So create a new campaign (you can call it “Test”) and create a new AdGroup. In the text ad section, enter the same exact text ad they use (definitely make sure the destination URL is the same) and then at the keyword section enter the keywords you found. Then Google will take you to the traffic estimate page. You don’t want to go past this page since you’re not going to run the advertisement yourself (you don’t want to give them free traffic). On this traffic estimate page, enter the max bid at $0.05 and see how many of their keywords are active and at what price they need to raise their keywords to activate them. Doing this will give you their minimum required bid on Google, so there’s your Min Bid. Then increase your bid until all the keywords are active (remember we are still on the estimated traffic page and are not activating this AdGroup), this will give you their max bid. When you’re done you will have the bid ranges and traffic estimates for that competitor. Make sure to click on the “Cancel” or “Back” button to prevent Google from actually creating that AdGroup.

Posted in AdWords