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Transcript: Competitor Bidding? 3 Things You NEED to do for SUCCESS

Running a competitor campaign can be a great way for you to increase the reach of your PPC campaigns. Of course, if you’ve maxed out on those generic terms that are usually really expensive competitor traffic can give you a boost of additional traffic that also comes with the extra benefit of being cheaper. What is the best way to capitalize on a competitor’s name?

How can you improve your campaigns by bidding on your competitor’s brand? What’s the best strategy for you to do that? In this video, we’re going to take a look at competitor bidding in detail and whether or not you should be doing it as a business. In addition to that, what is the right strategy to use when bidding on a competitor’s brand name? Let’s learn all of that and more coming up.

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Darren Taylor: Hey, guys, Darren Taylor of thebigmarketer.com here. My job is to make you a PPC expert. Now, if you’re new to the channel, I’m a trainer and consultant specializing in Google Ads techniques from the beginner all the way through to advanced, so if that sounds of interest to you, you should consider subscribing to the channel. In this video, we’re looking at competitor bidding and whether or not you should be doing it as a business.

An easy place for us to start is looking at the advantages of competitor bidding. The advantage of competitor bidding, particularly, if you’re a small business or a small advertiser, is that you can bid on a competitor with brand recognition and instantly have your ads show to people who you know could be interested in your product. Because of course, if they’re looking for your competitors, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be looking for you as well.

Because of course, you do a similar job to your competitors, hopefully, a better job and you want to put your brand in front of that person searching for your competitor for the first time, and make sure they get a click to your website instead of theirs. In addition to that, competitor traffic is usually pretty cheap when compared to other traffic out there. When you look at the generic terms in your industry and then compare that to competitor bidding, then you’re going to see a massive difference.

The benefit is you will be in front of the right people at the right time, but also the traffic is cheaper. Now, this sounds all good but the problem with this is, of course, it’s less likely to convert because of course, if I go to Google and search for a competitor to your business, if I see your advert, I could click your advert and potentially become a customer but ultimately, I was looking for your competitors.

It really is dependent on whether or not you can convert those people who are seeing your brand for the first time after seeing your competitor first, whether or not you can do a good job of converting those users. Now, more on that later. Before we go on to that, let’s take a closer look at the difference in costs between competitor and generic traffic. Here’s an easy way to determine the difference with your own account.

You’re probably bidding on your brand name already. If you’re not mistaken, you’re probably showing at the very top. Now, tell me the difference between your brand terms in terms of that CPC or paying for your brand clicks versus the generic clicks. Of course, the chances are the brand’s terms are a lot cheaper. When a competitor comes in and bids on your brand name, the same will apply to them as well.

They’re not going to see a massively inflated difference between your brand bidding and theirs, it’s only going to be a small amount more expensive. Now, put that in perspective. If your brand traffic is costing you 20% of your normal generic clicks, even if your competitor pays 40% of what you’d pay for a generic click, so double what you pay for your brand terms, it’s still cost-effective for your competitors.

Meaning, if you bid on your competitor’s brand terms, it still cost-effective for you because it’s still a cheaper source of traffic. At this point, you’ve probably decided that competitor bidding is something you should be doing. The strategy around it is really important as to whether or not it will work. Because if you go into it in the same way you go into bidding on generic terms, you might find yourself in a bit of difficulty.

Let’s take a look at how you should approach bidding on a competitor’s brand. Before I go into that, if you like what you’re hearing so far, hit the like button below and let me know in the comments question of the day, are you currently bidding on your competitors, and are your competitors currently bidding on your branded terms? Let me know in the comments, I reply to pretty much every comment I get so let me know down below.

When it comes to bidding on your competitors, there are three things you need to be aware of, three things you should put in place that are really, really important to a successful competitor bidding strategy. The first one is to, of course, do your research on the competitor’s specific offerings.

Now, if you know you’re cheaper than your competitor, you should be mentioning that in your ads, you should be mentioning that on your page. As well you should be explicitly mentioning your price. If your service is better, maybe have a longer warranty period, or maybe better support or longer-term support or anything different to the competitor in a positive way, you need to mention that in your ads as well. Because of course, if you go to the search results and I search for your competitor and I see your advert there, you need to give me a good reason to click your ad over the person I was searching for in the first place.

It’s really, really important you do your research on those competitors and understand your unique selling points that are better than theirs, and mention them in the ads in the first instance, and then reinforce it on your landing page when they click through. Because it’s really important to convert them from looking for your competitor to suddenly thinking, “Okay, I will go with you instead.”

The second approach you can take is to explicitly mention your competitor on your landing page. Now, there are some things you need to be aware of when doing this in terms of marketing and competition rules. Because of course, you’re allowed to mention your competitor if you’re doing something factually comparative with your competitors. Here’s a perfect example. In the world of online PPC click fraud software, we know that it’s fiercely competitive.

You can see there are examples of pages that compare different softwares based on whether or not they have different functionalities and features. Writing articles or creating content, comparing your service to your competitors, is a really good way to get that across. If I’m looking for a competitor of yours, if I see your advert that compares what they do with what you do, I’d be more inclined to click but in addition to that, when I click through and see how much better you are than the competitor, then I’m likely to convert on your website.

As opposed to a generic message, where it’s, “Here’s what we do, here’s our company, buy this thing that I’m selling”, it’s more a case of, “Hey, you were looking for these guys, but also over here, we do it better, and here is why, here’s the comparison between who you were looking for and what we provide.” That’s a great way to do it as well. Start researching your competitors and writing comparative content in order for you to capitalize on that branded traffic from them.

Finally, this might be the most important point when creating a competitor bidding strategy and that is, make sure you do your negative keyword research. Because when you’re bidding on a competitor’s brand, you have to understand that the search will be split into two categories. There’ll be people who are looking for your competitors because they want to do business with them, but there’ll also be people looking for your competitors who have already done business with them.

They are existing customers of your competitor and depending on the service, they might not be able to transact with you even if they wanted to, they might be tied into a contract, a utility is a perfect example of this. If you’re tied into a contract with the best of intentions, even if you do click a piece that compares your competitor to yourself, the person searching won’t care because they’re tied down into a contract.

They can’t actually transact with you. It’s really important to do your negative keyword research. Look for things like call center, contact number, helpline, support, all that kind of things that people will search for when they’re an existing customer of a business and are looking to get in touch, they’re the things you want to make explicitly sure are in your negative keyword list when running a competitor campaign.

Let’s call this bonus point number four, there’s one more thing I want to tell you guys before the video is finished, and that is, if you do your keyword research on your competitors, it can often highlight really high intent keywords that include their competitor name. A perfect example is people often use things like buy or quotes or a purchase driven term in addition to the competitor term.

Maybe it’s buy from X competitor or quote from X competitor, this is what you need to be looking at in addition to the existing negative keyword strategy I just mentioned. Also, think about their product lines or specific services. If people are looking for a specific service from one of your competitors, the chances are they haven’t transacted with them just yet, they’re interested but haven’t committed.

It’s a chance for you to intercept that with your message and your website and your comparison and you can hopefully win them over to your business. Make sure you look at the intent of the competitor terms as well because bidding on the brand name in isolation is okay, but if you find terms and high volume terms that are more driven and intent filled than the standard brand term, then it’s a great opportunity for you to capitalize on higher converting branded traffic as well.

Thank you guys for watching this video. If you liked it, please leave a like below and let me know in the comments, the question of the day, are competitors currently bidding on your brand terms, and of course, are you bidding on your competitor’s brand terms? Are you having any success in doing so? Let me know down below in the comments. I reply to pretty much every single comment I get. Like this video if you liked it, don’t forget to subscribe, check out the other content on my channel and I’ll see you guys on my next video.