Understanding Paid Bidding Strategy & Your Competitors with the Visibility Tracker
Posted on October 1, 2024
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Tess Werling
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Paid search auctions are never static, and bidding behaviour often changes without warning. Even the most seasoned marketing team can have a hard time interpreting sudden spikes in CPC, impression share fluctuations and performance volatility.
Enter the Visibility Tracker. We built the Visibility Tracker to shed more light on competitor bidding aggressiveness, allowing e-commerce brands to move from reactive optimisation to strategic auction control.
Why Competitors Outrank You Even When Your Campaigns Look Strong
Most advertisers assume that competitors outranking them is purely down to them spending more, but in reality, it’s down to their marketing strategies.
This includes things like increasing bids during peak trading hours, defending brand search traffic, temporarily over-invest during promotions (within budget) and adjusting smart bidding targets to dominate high-value auctions. Without visibility into these behaviours, brands often misdiagnose performance changes (and throw money the wrong way!)
Understanding Peak Period Bidding from Competitors
Competitor bidding intensifies around key retail moments like seasonal launches and clearance cycles (Black Friday being one example). Brands already invest time and team to monitor how and when all of these events affect their competitors' traffic.
With the Visibility Tracker, brands can get an even better overview, to in turn prepare budgets and bidding strategies ahead of demand surges instead of reacting once costs increase.
Defending Branded Keywords to Avoid Conquesting Behaviour
When competitors are bidding on your brand terms, it’s no accident and often signals aggressive growth strategies from your competitors. Although many brands don’t take too much notice of their branded terms (if they searched for us, they will find us, right?) not defending your brand can allow competitors to intercept high-intent traffic that was fully intent to go to your business.
By monitoring brand auction competition, the Visibility Tracker helps brands understand which competitors actively own their brand, when conquesting activity increases (and by whom) and how brand CPCs are influenced by competition.
Smart Bidding Signals to detect Competitive Patterns
Smart bidding has made competitor behaviour harder to detect but not impossible to interpret. It’s important to look for patterns such as sudden CPC inflation, rapid impression share growth, or fluctuating auction overlap, which can indicate automated bidding strategies being adjusted by competitors.
Brands that track these signals gain a clearer understanding of auction volatility and can adapt their own strategies accordingly.
More from Bidnamic
Maximise visibility and profitability across your entire catalogue
Bid more efficiently with our proprietary technology and convert purchase intent into sales.
The Strategic Advantage of Having Bidding Visibility over Your Competitors
When competitor bidding behaviour is clearly visible and collected over a longer period of time, brands have it easier to build more effective, not more expensive, strategies by:
Increase bids only where competitive pressure exists
Reduce unnecessary CPC inflation
Identify profitable conquesting opportunities
Plan investment around competitor promotional activity
Bidnamic’s Visibility Tracker helps ecommerce brands analyse competitor bidding patterns and auction aggression, turning volatile performance data into clear commercial insight.
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