What is the PPC Gap Tool?

Before we get into this subject fully, it is probably best to explain that this article presumes two things.

Firstly it presumes that the reader is familiar with what PPC is, how it works, and what the pros and cons are. Secondly it presumes that the reader will go on to read the full details of the PPC Gap Tool here.

This article is intended to be a top level primer on the concept of a PPC Gap and how a PPC Gap Tool can be used to identify hot keywords to exploit using the tool.

What is a PPC Gap?

A PPC Gap occurs when a specific keyword or key phrase is heavily populated on one PPC platform, and under populated on another.

A PPC Gap can also occur when a keyword or key phrase is heavily populated in one location (localized search) on a specific PPC platform, and not on another.

A PPC Gap can also occur as a combination of both of these situations.

Let us demonstrate a hypothetical example. The key phrase “make money online” may have 100 advertisers making use of this key phrase using Google AdWords, and only 10 advertisers making use of this key phrase using Microsoft AdCenter.

Here we would have found a considerable PPC Gap. Because this is a popular key phrase on Google AdWords, we can also be fairly sure it will also be a profitable key phrase using Microsoft AdCenter. Of course, this is a very hypothetical example; real figures would be far different.

Finding a PPC Gap

So, now that we know what a PPC Gap is in broad terms, let’s define the process we would use to locate one.

Well, we would begin by using standard keyword research techniques, to build a list of possible keywords. There are some great free resources for helping with this, including the Google Keyword Tool which can be found by clicking here.

We will assume that you are familiar with keyword research and that you have been able to put together at least a small list of possible keywords at this stage.

For example, let us use the key phrase “make money online” again and run it through the Google Keywords Tool, to get the following results:

So we can see that the competition (number of advertisers targeting this keyword) is high.

In fact, something this screenshot cannot show, is that by hovering over the word “high” a popup would tell us that the competition weighting for this keyword is 0.67.

We could then use the same keyword as a seed for generating a new Microsoft AdCenter campaign to find out the competition using the Bing/Yahoo PPC network.

If it is either considerably lower, or considerably higher than the competition for the same keyword using Google AdWords, we have found a PPC Gap.

However, there are two distinct disadvantages to this basic way of finding a PPC Gap:

a) it is slow, we would need to check each of our potential keywords, across possibly multiple locations, on two or more PPC platforms and

b) it can be difficult to judge the differences in competition across PPC networks, as each calculates and displays competition a little differently.

What we need is some kind of automated way to compare competition for a range of keywords, across multiple PPC platforms. Well the good news is that help is on hand, we can use a PPC Gap Tool.

Using a PPC Gap Tool

A PPC Gap Tool is a specialist software application (usually run as a web page) that can locate PPC Gaps quickly and easily. One such tool can be found on the AffiliateX website here.

How this tool works, is that you can feed in a number of keywords or key phrases, and the PPC Gap Tool will analyze each, comparing traffic across multiple PPC platforms, and across multiple locations within these PPC platforms, and return a comparison table, something like this:

In this example, we can see that a PPC Gap exists for both of the displayed key phrases, with a much lower number of advertisers using the Bing search engine.

Therefore, it would almost definitely be profitable to target these key phrases using the Microsoft AdCenter PPC platform.

In Conclusion

Locating PPC Gap for a high profit keyword or key phrase can give an internet marketer an incredible advantage, but locating them can be a tiresome, if not impossible task without using a PPC Gap Tool.

Join AffiliateX today to get ahead of the competition with your own PPC Gap tool.