Tired Of Competitors Running Ads On Searches For Your Business? Try A Brand Campaign
Have you ever searched your business on Google and seen ads for your competitors show up instead?
That’s because they’re using your business name as a keyword in their ad campaigns. So, every time someone searches for your business, your competitor is bidding to show their ads at the top of the search results page. This means that even if your business ranks organically number one when people search for its name, your competitors’ ads are still displayed above you.
Can You Stop Competitors Bidding On Your Brand Name?
No. Bidding on your brand name isn’t illegal, or even unethical. Your brand name is as legitimate a keyword as any other word. Unless your competitor is actually using your business name in their ad text, they are perfectly within their rights to bid on your business name as a keyword. In fact, it makes perfect sense for them to do so! The reason for this is that if a potential customer is interested in your products or services, there’s a good chance that they can be convinced to buy similar products from your competitors instead.
Imagine an offline example – if you’re thirsty, you might want to buy a can of Coca-Cola, but if Pepsi has paid to put a six-pack of their soft drink at the front of the shop, you might just buy Pepsi instead.
You can’t stop competitors bidding on your brand name, but you can make things a little more difficult for them. Let’s talk about brand campaigns.
Setting Up A Brand Name Campaign
If your rivals are bidding on your keywords, you should be too! This might seem counter-intuitive if you’re already ranking #1 organically for your brand name – but if customers are seeing your competitors’ ads above you, that #1 ranking suddenly becomes a lot less valuable.
Here’s how to set up a brand campaign:
- Create a new campaign in your Google Ads account.
- For the keywords, add your business name, as well as any abbreviations that people might use to search for you.
- Add these keywords as negatives to your other campaigns.
- Set a low budget to start with, maybe £2 a day.
- Write at least one responsive ad. Remember that whoever sees this ad has already searched for your name, so presumably they already know what your business is. Consider this when you write your ad, you don’t need to sell your business as much, and can focus more on your services or offers.
Why Is A Brand Campaign Effective?
Google calculates click costs based partly on how relevant the web page is to the user’s search, this gives your ad a quality score. The higher a quality score is, the cheaper the clicks on the ad will be, and the lower it is, the more expensive the clicks will be.
As far as Google is concerned, your website should be 100% relevant to users who are searching for your business so you should have a much higher quality score when bidding on your business name.
Imagine a user searches for H&M, an advert for TOPSHOP might still be a bit relevant, but nothing is going to get as relevant as the actual H&M website, so they’re likely to achieve a 10/10 quality score if they bid on their own brand name.
What To Do Now Your Brand Name Campaign Is Live?
So now that you’ve set up a brand campaign, either your ads are going to start showing up 1st, or your competitors are going to have to spend even more to show their adverts on searches for your business!
You don’t have to keep the spend low for your brand campaign, it all depends on how much marketing budget you have available. You could start increasing the budget and at a certain point, your competitors will decide it is not worth trying to outbid you. Because your ads have a higher quality score, it’s going to cost your competitor significantly more to try and keep up with you. The clicks on your brand name might only cost you a few pennies each, but your competitor will have to spend a lot more.
A side benefit of this advertising is that your brand campaign will likely have a very high click through rate (CTR). This can help to improve the performance of your overall account.
Hopefully, this has been a useful guide to what a brand campaign is, how to set one up and why they’re a great way of edging out the competitors that want to try and capture your customers. If you would like professional help with managing your PPC campaigns, speak to our team today.
