It used to be that the best way to research a pay per click campaign was through keyword research. Now with competition as stiff as it is, you'd be lucky to get by just on finding market keywords. After all, that's pretty much what everyone else is doing.

These days I want to review the niche in full and see what all my pay per click competitors are doing before I even dip my toes in the water. In doing so, I've been able to reduce my costs dramatically as well as launching PPC campaigns that "hit the ground running". No time wastage, no budget wastage - just pure quality marketing.

In knowing exactly what to put into your campaign before you launch it, you're way ahead of most competitors who are running and testing as they go. Don't get me wrong, testing is hugely important to keep on improving your marketing. However, if someone else has already made the mistakes, tested and refined the material, why not make use of it to cut your own wasted ad spend and get in front of everyone else?

Recently, I documented how I explored and researched a niche prior to creating a PPC campaign (and prior to any keyword research). Using PPC Bully 2.0, I was able to:

1. Find the hottest selling keywords for an offer
   Discover which offers and ads are profitable
   
2. See who's running the top ads in the marketplace
   
3. Know how long a particular ad has been active and shown for
   
4. Extract all the keywords that competitors are using
   
5. Uncover what else they were marketing with a view to doing that as well
   
6. Find out what time of day and what days of the week are the peak times to run PPC ads
   
7. Check out what other advertisers are paying on average

In short, I was able to not only research up-to-date data for my PPC campaigns; I was able to scope out the advantages I could use to make my marketing even better than anyone else's (and probably cheaper!)

You can see a detailed case study of what I did and review PPC Bully 2.0 here.