Advertise On Your Competitors Website
September 9th, 2008Is it TIME to IMS ?
These days, most of the niche website publishers add the Google adsense code to their website to increase the website’s revenue. This usually helps the webmasters in paying their hosting and domain registration/renewal charges.
And sometimes, a few webmasters selling a very competitive product/service uses Google Adsense to increase their revenue by a few hundred bucks. These webmasters are unaware of how many visitors leaving their website (by clicking on these ads) are paying someone else to buy a similar product.
Advertising on your competitors website ensures that you get highly targeted visitors to your web-page and helps you eat your competitors share of online sign-ups, especially when you are selling a highly competitive product.
Lets take the example of two organizations providing Management Entrance training. T.I.M.E (time4education.com | Page rank 4) and IMS (imsindia.com | Page rank 5)
Firstly, lets analyze their traffic trends. (Click on the picture to zoom)
The above graph clearly indicates that T.I.M.E’s website has got more traffic than IMS’s website on every single day from July 1st till September 6th.
By now, you should have noticed the ads by Google Adsense on T.I.M.E’s website. Lets try and get some visitors from T.I.M.E to IMS.
We will first create an ad using Google Adwords by using the new tool called Placement targeting (introduced by Google recently). Take a look at the advertisement i have created using the placements tab. (Click on the picture to zoom)
In the above screen shot, you must have noticed that, we are targeting only TIME’s website using placement targeting. This will ensure that our ads will appear only on this website.
While adding the Adsense code, the webmaster of TIME must have added the competitive filter to the adsense code, so that, IMS or any other (direct)competitor should not be able to advertise on his website. Lets take a look at the screen shot to add competitive filter. (Click on the picture to zoom)
You must have noticed that the competitive filter settings allow you to ban specific websites (url’s) from showing ads , but they do not let you ban specific keywords from being used in the advertisements on your website. (for ex. IMS is a keyword here)
To get through the competitive ad filter. we created our Adwords campaign, by using the url “www.syedtaha.com” as the destination url. Which means, when the visitors click on our advertisement on T.I.M.E’s , they reach syedtaha.com.
Now, lets add a simple code on the destination page to redirect the visitors to the IMS’s website.
<meta HTTP-EQUIV=”REFRESH” content=”0; url=http://www.imsindia.com”>
*Should be placed between <head> and </head> tags.
This code will ensure that the visitor lands on IMS’s website once he clicks the ad which we just created.(Domain forwarding can also be used for redirecting visitors)
When we start our Adwords Campaign, this is what we see…
(Click on the picture to zoom)
For Screen shot of homepage click here
Happy Advertising 
* Domains like imsiindia.com or imsindiia.com could have been used which helps in branding. Visitors will usually not notice the wrongly spelled domain as they reach the right domain after redirection.
*The trick is to create attractive Ads so that the visitors click on them. After redirection, once they reach your website, your website should be able to make the sale.
