When it comes to pay per click, it is a very transparent market where you can hide nothing & you can fool no one. Before you crack your head while trying to find some good ideas, why not simply borrow ideas from your competitors? By the way, you not have to pay back what you borrowed, sounds good?
Keywords
Some people say that your keywords are like your little nuggets of gold. I say that the keywords that your competitors are currently using could be your pot of gold.
Free Tool
Take the domain names of your competitors, type them into the free Google keyword tool, then you will get all the relevant keywords. Here is where you can find out which keywords you missed out.
Paid Tools funnel hacks training
There are many paid tools such as Spyfu, KeyCompete, KeywordSpy, AffiliateElite which you can use to find out which keywords your competitors are using & what ads they are displaying.
Landing Pages
When it comes to pay per click marketing, the topic of landing pages always appear. When you are spying on your competitors look at their sales funnel from the top view, look at their keywords, ads, landing pages & offer.
What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? Here is where you can shortcut your success by learning from their mistakes & improving on their strengths. Look at their offer, the way they write their sales message, also observe which is the greatest benefit they are showing.
Summary
Often, just by casually looking at your competitors & their marketing, you can get pretty good ideas. Who needs to do all the research when your competitors have done most of the work for you already!