Help with analyzing and beating competitors

I would like to think I am pretty good at Adwords, but a discovery I made today makes me think otherwise.

When I fire up a campaign for the most coveted term in my niche, I literally could spend $100 to $200 a day on the term...so $3000 to $6000 a month when its all said and done. While I get some sales from it, the moral of the story is that it is a severe losing proposition. There is no way I make anywhere near $3000 in sales.

Yet today I discovered that the top performers in my niche (I know who they are) are my absolute competition for the top three spots. I am in an industry where there are plenty of successful people who have nothing to do with the internet, and it turns out I just found at the the biggest players offline or online, are online competitors targeting our main term.

So, are they just hemorrhaging money to secure the top spots?

OR

Do they have a strategy that is night and day better than mine that at least allows them to run close to even or better? The customers we acquire are for life, so acquiring a new customer may not be immediately profitable, but could easily become that over time.

Any tools or suggestions to find out what they are doing? Unfortunately in this case I think I need to do a little Rip Off And Duplicate strategy to become a bigger threat to my competition!