RKG Logo 434-978-4300

More wisdom from “The Wizard”, FeedBurner’s founder, Dick Costolo. Dick writes a great blog, well worth adding to your reader.

To whit: always focus on your goals, not on your competitors.

When you focus on your company’s goals, you are focusing on something you have control over, you make strong decisions, and everybody knows what success looks like. When you obsess about your competitors, you are focusing on something over which you don’t have control, you make bad decisions, and nobody is sure what success looks like, since the company’s actions are in reaction to a third party. Being fiercely competitive is fine, you can hate that your competitors are performing better than you, and you can be hyper-paranoid about what might happen to your business, but the best way to compete in the market is to focus on those things you can strive toward independent of what anybody else does.

Coincidentally, we think Dick’s advice is also spot-on for winning at paid search. In most cases, you should bid based on your goals, your priorities, your economics, your margin, your conversion. While in rare cases it might make strategic sense to chase a competitor up and down the page with bidding games, usually such strategies destroy more value than they create.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

If you like this post, consider subscribing to our RSS feed. You can also have new posts sent to you via email.


Related Posts

No Comments Yet

Your comment will be first!

Your Comment

Tags

Trackback

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/04/21/goals-not-competitors/trackback/

Email Updates

Categories

Recent Comments

  • Cory Grassell: What are your thoughts on stats that suggest consumers are more apt to click on organic search results than PPC results? As a...
  • George Michie: Kevin, Marc, thanks for your comments. Help is coming, but not the solution. There are a number of instances when the CTR on the...
  • Marc Adelman: George, You have been an advocate of “the advanced control option” for years now. Depressing right YEARS! Eh…listen...
  • Kevin Hill: Is what they really need is a fourth match type. Here’s google’s help documentation on broad match: This is the default...
  • Kevin Micalizzi, Dimdim Web Conferencing: Jim (& George)- We still offer a free version of Dimdim. Just click Sign Up Now at the top of the...
  • Tomas: indeed, i can’t talk about it either… :)
  • Philip Price: Thank you for the RegHack, it worked for me, tho at first when i made the reg file with the information i copied from above i also...
  • George Michie: Sorry Jim, this post was written in 2007. Apparently some of those products are gone.
  • Jim: Hey, I checked two products like dimdim and cutepdf but none is free. What are you talking about free and open source?
  • George Michie: If they keep hearing the same message, and seeing evidence in the data to back it up, something will have to give. There is hope on...
  • Tomas: I’ve been having the same argument with Google for months now and in the end there does seem to be a feature in the algorithm that...
  • George Michie: Doesn’t have to be, it can be intra-adgroup as well.
  • Josh: George – I take it you’re referencing a scenario where your exact-match keywords are not listed as negative exact match keywords...
  • George Michie: Melissa, you’re right, it’s always happened to varying degrees, particularly since the advent of extended broad match....
  • Mel66: I don’t think this is a bug. It’s been happening for years. It *is* impossible to manage, and I can’t help but wonder if...

Blog Stats

  • Posts: 948
  • Words: 451,089
  • Comments: 2,876

Administration