Although I swear by
Perry Marshall's Adwords eBook, here's another little known hint that you will only get from me.
Much to the surprise of many Americans, there is a rather vibrant country next door called Canada. This is a land where the per capita Internet Use is the largest in the world. So, what does this mean to you...there are millions of Canadian internet users, who are not shy to purchase online.
Now, how does this relate to adwords. Well, as luck would have it, many of the above mentioned Americans have not clued into the simple fact that Canada does indeed exist. So, when given the choice of where they want there Google Adwords to appear, they automatically choose only United States.
Now this is good for you for a couple of reasons. First, if you choose Canada for your campaign, chances are very good that you will be competing against fewer bidders. Second, that means you will be able to get a higher CTR at a lower CPC.
Now, here's the really valuable hint....
Not even Wordtracker or Ad Equalizer will break the keywords and impressions down to a country level for you. So, here is how you do your research.
If you are in the U.S., go to
www.google.com to check out how many bidders are competing against you for a specific keyword in the United States.
Now, comes the tricky part, to determine how many bidders you would compete against in Canada, you have to do 2 things...
First, find a "public" proxy located in Canada. Through tools & connections, change your Lan settings to the Canadian Proxy. Now, go to google.ca, and enter your keyword phrase. You will see how many people are bidding against your term for anyone searching google from Canada.
Simply going to google.ca isn't enough. Google is smart,and will still determine from your ISP's ip address that you are in the states. You will need to change your proxy as well, as outline above, to get true Canadian results.
Often you will find keywords that are worth bidding on only in Canada, and not in the U.S.
Oh yah, got to remember to make this advice worth while for all of us...again, here's the tools I swear by...
Wordtracker
Adword Equalizer
O.K, now that the commercial is over..use the "Canada" suggestion above. You won't find it anywhere else, and it truly is worth it's weight in gold.