The Ins and Outs of Competitor Keyword Bidding for PPC

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One of the greatest things about PPC is that if there is a query with enough search volume, you can likely bid on it. Not only that, but you can have your brand showing front and center on a search engine results page for that query as well. That is just one of the benefits of bidding on your competitor’s branded or trademark terms because it allows you to get right in front of prospective customers and persuade them to consider your product or service instead. When done right, competitor keyword bidding can be a profitable venture for a PPC strategy. In this blog, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of competitor keyword bidding as well as the tactical and strategic best practices to maximize results.

Pros and Cons

Before you consider identifying your top competitors and increasing bids on their terms, it’s important to weigh the positives and negatives of this strategy.

Pros:

Incremental leads/sales – When scaling a PPC account, it’s important to consider all options when looking for keyword expansion opportunities. Look no further than your competitors’ branded terms! Unless specified through a contract, it is not against the rules to bid on these types of terms. By doing so, you open up the opportunity to appear for relevant traffic and attract potential prospects away from your competitors. While conversion rates may be lower, this is still a great way to drive more leads/sales through your site.

Branding potential – As mentioned in the preceding section, your ads will be distributed to many prospects who are already relevant to your business because they are looking for an organization very similar to yours. This provides a great branding opportunity while your potential customers are in a critical consideration phase in the purchase funnel. Make certain to leverage engaging ad copy but be careful when using specific trademark terms in the messaging or risk ad disapprovals.

Cons:

High cost-per-click – Depending on your account average CPC is, you may run the risk of seeing higher click costs when running a competitor campaign. This is due in large part to the fact that you will likely have low Quality Score on competitor terms, which will inherently drive CPCs up. If you currently run PPC campaigns for your site, you know that your branded CPC is always of the cheapest. This is because your ads are most relevant to your site which is why your Quality Score on those terms will be strongest. It’s this exact reasoning as to why your competitor keywords will see a low Quality Score and that’s due to the relevance of your site to those terms.

Negative relationships – Would you like it if your competitors started bidding on your branded terms? Didn’t think so. Another potential con is negative relationships that you might begin with your competitors when bidding on their terms. They may reach out with a cease and desist letter or they might start bidding on your branded terms to try and drive up your CPCs. While certainly a negative, the gains from bidding on your competitors’ terms might outweigh the issues here.

Strategic Best Practices

Now that we’ve discussed the pros and cons to competitor keyword bidding, it’s time we talk about how to execute a successful competitor campaign.

Campaign structure: Separate your competitor keyword targeting into its own campaign. This will allow for easier optimizations. Other benefits are as follows:

  • Budget management – Ensure you are not devoting too much of your overall efforts to this one strategy. Setting a daily cap on how much you are willing to spend will help you stay on top of these campaigns.
  • Geo-specific targeting – If you are looking to minimize costs when it comes to competitive bidding, consider only targeting in certain higher priority regions. You’ll be able to still have visibility in top markets but you’ll not waste spend in less important areas.
  • Ad scheduling – Similar to geo-specific targeting, ad scheduling is another campaign specific optimization that can be used to manage costs. Use ad scheduling to only have your competitor campaign distribute ads at certain times of day or days of week that are most advantageous for your business.

Ad copy: An important consideration with competitor campaigns, is having the most engaging ad copy in rotation. Ideally, you should test a number of different ad variations. We’ve recommended some messaging considerations below:

  • Trademark variations: Instead of using a competitor’s trademark term, consider using a close variation that will still produce high Quality Scores but protects you from potential trademark infringement claims.
  • Inclusion of pricing – One of the best approaches when bidding on competitor keywords, is to include pricing in your ad copy especially if your prices are better than your competitor’s.
  • Competitive benefits – Does your platform deploy in under an hour and your competitor’s platform takes 24 hours? Do you offer free shipping and the competition charges $5.95? If your product or service has superior benefits, don’t be afraid to hammer that messaging home!

Landing pages: The last piece of the puzzle is converting traffic at a high rate, and that is mostly done with an effective landing page experience. It’s important to include iterations of your competitor’s trademark term if you can to ensure you are maximizing Quality Score too. Please find two approaches to developing an effective landing page below:

  • Conservative approach – If you’ve decided that bidding on your competitor’s terms is enough and you don’t want to bug them anymore, we recommend providing prospects a conservative landing page experience. This would be similar to your current strategy where the above-fold CTA is prominent but you have additional below-fold CTAs to engage users even further. Also, be sure to showcase messaging that makes you appear superior to your competitors.
  • Aggressive approach – If you are thinking about a more aggressive approach, consider a comparison chart that directly presents why your product or service is better than your competitor’s. This would include pricing and any other superior benefits side by side with the competitor’s name included in the chart. Insights from prior tests show this as a very effective strategy.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can more effectively leverage a competitor bidding strategy, please contact us by email at sales@synapsesem.com or by phone at 781-591-0752.

What You Need to Know About Google’s Expanded Text Ads

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In our latest blog post regarding expanded text ads (ETAs), we talked about the expected outcomes of running expanded text ads within your campaigns.  Now that we’ve had these ads live for a few months for several of our clients, we found some surprising results and unexpected outcomes.

When first launching this new ad format across our high volume ad groups back in July, we were not seeing the results we expected.  CTR was not significantly improving (and in some cases they were worse), conversion rate was lower, and most curiously – impressions for our expanded text ads were lower than our standard ads (even though we were set on indefinite rotation).  Given all the hype Google had created around this beta, we were understandably disappointed.

Our team spent some time brainstorming different ideas as to why performance was down for our ETA ads.  Were people confused by this new layout and unsure of whether they wanted to engage with these new ad formats?  Did the ETAs look too busy with the extensive text and double headlines?  Perhaps the display URLs that were automatically pulling in were not perfectly optimized in terms of URL structure, and thus looked strange within the ETA ads.  The performance indicator that truly had us baffled, however, was the low impression split for ETAs.  Unable to explain the discrepancy in impressions, our team did what any search team in crisis has learned to do: we called Google.

The Google representatives we spoke to confirmed that prior to July 26, ETAs were not eligible to show 100% of the time.  Up through July 26, Google had gradually increased the percentage of impressions that ETAs were eligible to show for (i.e. 20%, then 50%, etc.).  On July 26, the update was made that allowed ETAs to show up for 100% of impressions, just like standard ads.  This piece of information made a big difference in how we were analyzing our ad performance.  Below, we’ve outlined the differences in ETA versus standard ad performance both before and after the update on July 26, when the ETAs became eligible to show 100% of the time.

Impression volume and CTR

Prior to the update in July, impressions were down for ETAs by 25-30% versus impressions for our standard ads.  CTR for standard ads was also not too far off from the ETA CTR, with less than a 15% difference between the two.  This was not in line with the expectations Google had set, which was an average 20% improvement in CTR for ETAs versus standard ads.  It wasn’t until after the switch on July 26 that impressions evened out for ETA ads (and in some cases even outweighed standard ad impressions).  CTR also improved for ETA ads after the update in July, (21% above the CTR for standard ads) finally meeting the expectations that Google had set.

Conversion Rate

Prior to the update in July which allowed ETAs to be eligible for 100% of auctions, conversion rate was down 5% for ETAs versus standard ads for our higher volume clients and ad groups.  Post-July update, ETA conversion rate actually outperformed standard ads by 10%.  While Google originally had not made any promises regarding shifts in conversion rate, it’s great to see that the longer ads are leading to a stronger rate of conversion.

Cost Per Click

Before the July update, ETAs still had more efficient CPCs, however the margin between ETA CPCs and standard ad CPCs only improved with the July update.  Prior to July, ETA CPCs were 11% more efficient than standard ads for our highest volume clients.  Once the switch was made in July, ETA CPCs were 17% more efficient.  Why could this be happening?  Potentially due to improvements in Quality Score with ETA ads now that more characters are allowed, which allows advertisers to more easily incorporate relevant keywords into their messaging.

There are still some mixed reviews out there on how expanded text ads are performing versus standard ads, but across our clients we have certainly seen improvements now that all ETAs are 100% eligible to show.  With Google permanently rolling out ETAs in October, it’s important for advertisers to begin analyzing performance on their expanded ads as soon as possible.  Synapse clients have certainly seen improvements, but it remains to be seen whether improved ETA performance will be able to stand the test of time.  If you tested ETAs when they first launched and were disappointed by the results, consider retesting.  The initial issues surrounding impression share have been resolved, and we’re seeing in many cases even better impression share for ETAs vs standard ads.

If you’d like to learn more about how Synapse SEM can help you improve your paid search strategy, please complete our contact form or call us at 781-591-0752.