I found out about this trick from a email newsletter from some marketer (don’t remember which one, as I’m subscribed to almost all of them with one email :-).

It’s quite useful if you want to know how to write & design the best Ads and Landing Pages for a certain keyword/niche. And, it works not only on Google, but also MSN & Yahoo.

So here is the technique:

Say you want to find out who are the top performing advertisers for the keyword “Find a job” (this is a profitable niche right now all around the world, ’cause of the recession & sutff).

You’ll be presented with about 10 paid ads from different advertisers. Notice the top ones. When I checked, they were SnagaJob.com, JobFox.com & ManPower.com. Now refresh the browser10-20 times & watch how the list changes. The advertisers that have the lowest Quality Score (i.e. they’re new to AdWords or their Landing Page & Ads aren’t the best) will move down the list and completely dissappear by the 10th refresh. The ones that are left are either paying a lot or have a high Quality Score (usually the latter, as Google seems to not care anymore whether you’re paying $1 or $10 if your ads & LP’s suck). In my case they were the 3 mentioned above plus Job.com on the 4th place.

What you do now is open all of those links in new tabs/windows & study the Landing Pages. Also, refresh the browser more times to see their other ads (they’ll most probably have the same link but different text).

Analyze how they insert the keywords in their ads, the LP’s tags, whether they have links to other parts of the site or it’s just a standalone page, the keyword density on the Landing Page (I use WordFlood, which wasn’t made for this, but it does the job).

After you’ve done that, make a checklist or something of what they all have in common and what are the differences between the one that ranks first and the one that ranks 4-5th.

Now all you have to do is use all this intel and create your own super LP/website which combines the best & excludes the worst from your competitors. You can (and most probably will want to) copy their ads and start your campaign.

Don’t forget to set your initial bids high. You’ll spend more in the first week, but after that your ads will start having a high CTR and low cost per click and they will certainly rank high (like 1-4th place).

Also, if the ad ranks high for “find a job”, it will most probably rank on the same spot or better for longer keywords that contain the initial one, i.e. “find a job in US”, “find a job in New York”, “find a job in Alaska”, “find a job in Germany”, etc.

I hope those who understood this post won’t have to find a job :-).