How to Bid Shadow

or just find out what your competition is paying

[Drum]

I am new to AdWords.

I basically want to find out what my competitors are bidding for keywords. Since I am new I think I could learn a lot from my competition who has been doing AdWords for a while.

How do you find out what they are bidding so I can "shadow" them?

Dave

[Pengi]

Have you tried asking them nicely? That's probably the approach that is most likely to be successful. For good reason, Google does not make this information available.

In any case, what your competitors are bidding and their ad ranking for that bid, will not carry across to a different site and Adwords account - the qulaity scores will differ and these too will affect the Ad ranking.

I would suggest that you start off by bidding at a level you consider will be profitable for you (possibly on the low side of this). Monitor your data and adjust your bid up or down acording to the results and keyword positions. Note that is may take between a few days and a few weeks before all your ads are fully approved and showing everywhere.