“If only they knew about our brand instead.” “I want people to think of our brand even when their go-to is our competitor.” Have you ever had these thoughts as a business owner? Maybe you want to increase your market share or want people to choose you over your competitors.
Well, with Google Ads, you can target people who search for any keywords, including your competitors’ brand names. In this blog post, we will go over how an online marketing advertiser can specify ads to show for specific competitor name searches, and the results of one of our clients who is running a competitor campaign.
Finding Company A When You Search For Company B on Google
Have you ever searched for a specific company on Google, but the first search result you were served was a different company? More than likely, this was an ad that the competitor of the company you searched for is running.
As you see in the example above, the user searched for “unbounce,” a landing page software company, and Instapage, another landing page software company, served an ad at the top of the list. The use of ad copy here is also relevant, as the advertiser suggests to use their software “instead” of the one you searched.
Note: Dedicated Designs offers landing page creation and utilization to our Google Ads clients, but more on that later.
Both of these companies are global businesses, but this strategy can be used by smaller, local businesses as well. Read the following section to learn how the online marketing advertisers on our team carry out this strategy for a local restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Serving Your Ad to People Who Search For Your Competitor
One of our quick-service restaurant clients, a deli and sandwich shop franchise in California’s Bay Area, wanted to expand their brand awareness. However, rather than only targeting people who searched for “sandwich shop near me,” they also wanted to target people who searched for one of their key competitors.
As you can see in the image above, our client’s competitor’s campaign has generated over 1,300 impressions, the number of times the ad was served, and over 385 clicks. These numbers equate to an extremely high 28% clickthrough rate. This means that 1 in every 4 people who see our client’s ad after searching for their competitor is clicking to learn more about our client’s restaurant.
Furthermore, because we’re using target impressions share for our bid strategy type, we’ve manifested our results to mark 99% of all impressions to be in the top four results of the search engine page, and 94% to be the absolute top result. In other words, although 3 of every 4 impressions are not being clicked on, they are being seen by people, hence increasing our client’s brand awareness.
Lastly, although our client’s main focus is not generating sales with this competitor campaign, we are still tracking any desired conversions. In the last 30 days, 18 people have clicked their “Order Online” button and four have clicked the call button.
Landing Pages and Call Tracking
As previously mentioned, Dedicated Designs offers landing page creation and utilization for all of our ad clients. Landing pages allow us to mimic our clients’ main website, while removing any distractions which may stop a visitor from converting. Landing pages also allow us to implement all tracking scripts we need to track conversions and feed the data back to Google Ads. Lastly, landing pages allow us to easily A/B test different aspects of the page for further post-click optimizations.
We also offer call tracking for our clients. Tracking inbound calls allows the client and the advertisers to know which keywords are generating calls. Our team can analyze various details about calls, whether it is a first or repeat caller, the duration of the call, and more.
If you are interested in boosting your brand awareness with Google Ads competitor campaign, we’d be happy to discuss if the ad platform is right for you. Please get in touch with us by filling out the form below or emailing marketinghelp@dedicateddesigns.com, and we will respond to you quickly.
