EP 13: What the Growth!? – How to Target Your Competitor’s Brand Name On Google Ads

In this episode of What the Growth!? Nick goes over how to target your competitor’s brand name on Google Ads.

In this episode, we’ll be talking about how you can increase the effectiveness of your Google Adwords campaigns. You can drive more leads and revenue by targeting your competitor’s keywords on Google Adwords. This is a tactic that Visitor Queue has used from the very beginning and has contributed a lot to our growth. So, let’s get started.

Example of Brands Using Their Competitor’s Brand Name on Google Ads

For most, it may be surprising that you can do this, and that it is completely legal. In fact, some of the largest brands in the world use this strategy. If you’ve ever done a search for a brand name and have seen an ad appear on the search engine result page that wasn’t for that brand you typed in there’s a very high likelihood that the company is bidding on that brand name. Below is an example of what appears when “Agile CRM” is searched. You can see that the top results are for different companies.

How to Build a Competitor’s Brand Name Campaign

Building this type of campaign is no different than building any other type of Google Adwords campaign. First, create or log in to your Adwords Account. Navigate to the campaign section and click New Campaign. Go through the steps of creating a search campaign. Select your goals, locations, networks, languages, budget, and bidding depending on your preferences. Then, create your ad group. Input your competitor’s brand name into the ad group keywords or multiple ad groups if you want to target multiple versions of their brand name now for ad creation.

Go through the steps of creating the ad. Keep in mind the use of their brand name in the ad can reduce the ad from being shown in specific countries if they have a trademark for that brand name in that country. So, determine if you want to try using the brand name in the ad and risk it not being shown in some countries. Or, if you want to avoid the use of the brand name in the ad altogether.

Common uses of their brand name in the ad may be “Switch From Company XYZ today” or “Company XYZ vs. Your Company Brand Name” and link the ad to a landing page of a comparison you have completed for that company. You may want to start by mentioning their brand name and then seeing if your ads get flagged in certain countries if they do, split those countries into a separate campaign where the ads don’t mention their brand name and continue using their brand name in your ads for countries where they are not flagged.

Wrap Up

That’s all for this episode of What the Growth!? Ensure you tune back next month for another growth tip and as always let us know if there’s a tip or trick you want to learn more about.