Should You Run A Google Ads Campaign Targeting Your Competitors?

I have a question for you. And that is, should I run a campaign targeting my competitors? Yes. Again, very commonly asked questions, and I would say you must try it. And if you're running a competitor campaign, always set them up as a separate campaign with its own budget. So unlike Facebook, In Google, the budget is set up at the campaign level.

So, if you put a campaign, if you set up a campaign with your brand, your non-branded keywords and your competitors in one campaign, then you don't have any control as to how much budget will be eaten up by any one of these ad groups. But if you keep them separate, brand should be separate. Non-branded keywords should be separate as well as competitors.

Then you can control the brand. You only put them in the same campaign. If the budget is not an issue, if it's limited by budget, when you see that message, you keep increasing it. But if you want to control it. Okay, I just want to pay $50 a day to see how my campaign runs with my competitors bidding on it, then put them up as a separate campaign, allocate a certain budget, run it and see what happens.

Now for example, let's say an example of a dentist, you might start to get ads, I would like to cancel my appointment or change my appointment because they're thinking they're calling their dentist even though they can. Many people don't see what's written on the ads, unfortunately. They'll just click on the ad thinking it's them because they've searched for that dental practice or clinic and the ad popped up and they've just clicked it.

Or if it's a call ad, they click the call button and you get the call. Same thing with WIFI or broadband service companies who people want to ask for their billing or their router has broken down and they need a replacement. So, you'll start to get all these calls and if you find that you are getting lot of irrelevant calls, then you need to be very aggressive on the negative keywords.

So, things like billing service, repairs, add them as negative keywords. So, you don't do. But people are just going to bid on the name, they're not going to put in Virgin repair, they'll just put in Virgin or BT or AT&T and so on. So, you got to try. Sometimes it works wonderfully well and sometimes it doesn't. So, if you got an offer which is a lot better than your competitors, then by all means do that.

Because in some industries and niches, price point is the biggest point where people will convert or they're going to jump ship from one to the other. If you got a mobile phone and the other competitor company comes in with a new plan and it saves you $20, $30 a month, you surely are going to jump ship. So, in that case, we know that we don't bid on pricing because you want to offer value in your service.

But in certain cases, like a phone company, a phone is a phone, iPhone is same with company one to company two. But if the company two is giving better price, they must bid on the other competitors' brand name or term and get their message in front of that audience. Interesting. It sounds like if you think a little bit outside the box and you can be quite strategic with this and creative, you can be very creative and try it and see what happens.

Yeah. It's not just about blatantly necessarily bidding on a competitor, it's actually about you're not misleading, that you're not pretending to be that company. No. You're saying this is who I am and this is what I've got. Yeah. And I'm just thinking I've had it. You go looking for a particular flight with a particular Airline, and you click the first run and you realize you've ended up in a portal and it wasn't what you thought.

So, yeah, we've all fallen for that. Great advice. Thank you.