All’s fair in love and war! Right! ? I wonder if this applies to looking for bidding opportunities with your brand competition.
Google does allow brands to bid on competitors’ branded keywords, so it’s an acceptable practice. As long as you don’t mention the trademarked brand name of your competitor directly in your ad copy.
So if Google allows it, it must be a good practice. Let’s see how you can use this type of bidding using your brand competition.
What Is Brand Bidding?
So what this means is you can bid on your competitor’s brand name when somebody searches for it, but your ad must clearly represent your brand.
What if that brand is not too happy about you bidding on their brand name? This is where some war may come into play. Bidding war that is!
But let’s look at the good points about using brand competition in your bidding strategies! The ‘love’ side! ?
What happens is when you bid on your brand competition it gives the person searching an alternative option to the competition’s brand. Which is you! You end up being #1 on Google search and they can come in at second.
This means you will get some highly valuable traffic to your brand. People would be choosing you instead of your competitors brand ?
What better way could there be to guarantee that you’re getting a qualified audience for your product! People who are searching for your competitor’s brand are also in the market for your products.
So you’re not really deceiving the user, you’re just giving them another choice!
Test Your Keywords
If you decide to test brand competition bidding, you need to think about the keyword variants that can show where the customer is in their search journey.
They could just be in the initial stages or they could already be an existing customer simply seeking to log in. Write out a list of curated brand name keyword variants to help you cover the intent you want.
Keep an eye on the return you’re getting from specific keywords to see which ones are worth continuing to bid on.
Competitor Bidding to Build a Brand
Bidding on your competitors’ brands helps you gain brand awareness. This happens because you’re showing up when a consumer is searching for a product from your competitor’s brand.
This is extremely useful if you’re trying to build awareness in a new market. When you bid on established competitors, it helps you nail down on the people researching products in your market ??
But competitor keywords may not have a lower CPC (cost per click) than non-brand terms. This happens when certain industries have several players bidding because they’ve caught on to this concept of bidding on your brand competition.
And your conversion rate might be lower, too. This can happen because you won’t be able to weed out the people who really love the brand they’re searching for. In those cases, people won’t bat an eye at your ad! Even if you’re at the top of the page in search.
You Want To Be Mindful Of Bidding Wars
Avoiding this type of bidding war at times might be impossible.
If your competitor sees you bidding on them, then they may start bidding on your brand name. That’s what a bidding war is! Starting a vicious cycle of bidding on each other’s brand name.
When this happens you both lose potential sales and the ad expense goes up for both parties.
So what can you do about a bidding war ❓
Sometimes, you can reach a mutual agreement to not bid on each other’s names. Especially when the CPC rate is high. But be sure to find out the regulations for this type of arrangement!
Test The Data
Test the data to see if brand competition bidding is working for you. Do this even if there is a bidding war going on.
Test it all, because sometimes and quite often, all the leads you get from your competitor searches can be more qualified. And qualified leads tend to convert into paying customers ?
It can still be worth it, even if the CPAs are higher.
The Conclusion of the Matter
In the end, customers will make their own decision about whether they want to stay faithful to your brand or someone else’s with similar products. It quite often has to do with the experience they have with the brand after they’ve clicked through to their website.
If you decide that competitor bidding isn’t right for you, then you just don’t have to do that type of bidding.
But what are you going to do when your competition takes advantage of bidding on your brand?
Targeting your brand competition can be highly profitable ? It’s best to weigh out all the ups and downs that go along with this type of bidding first. Do your research and continue to test everything!