I was about to go to bed (it's 3 AM already) but I just had to turn the key one more time - Johnathan Mendez's post of Branded PPC got me to think about Nordstrom.com, which he uses as an example.
Using SpyFu.com, I determined NordStrom.com is spending about 68,000 dollars a day on PPC, yet 90% of that spend is on just 77 terms!
62,019.74 per day are spent on 77 terms where over 100 dollars per day are being spent. Only 68,500.81 per day is spent on the entire keyword list of 5329 keyword phases that SpyFu.com extracted. Again, I don't know how accurate the numbers are, but they're believable.
And if you can do what I just did - you can figure out what's important to a company, based on what they're spending money on -and that's insight and the basis for a competitive strategy (see chart below).
One more thing - the data SpyFu.com pulls might be several months old (which might limit the effectiveness of using SpyFu.com to get the latest info on a competitor's PPC strategy); don't expect these extracted terms to be the same one's that Nordstrom is running now.
