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Foreign. Hello and welcome to the Paint Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today I'm going to talk about targeting your competitors in Google Ads. Specifically, that's referring to your ad showing up when someone searches for a competitor of yours. It is a rather sticky topic, something that I have quite a few opinions about and today I'm going to just address it head on. I'm going to talk about my advice on when it works, when it doesn't, and then at the end of the show, I'm going to tell you exactly the settings that I would suggest using for this campaign so that by the time you're listening to this episode, by the time you're done listening to this episode, you'll know exactly whether you want to do it and if you do want to do it, how to do it, and how it will work best for you. So that's what today's entire episode is about, targeting your competitors. Before I jump in, I want to tell you how this, this podcast is even possible. It's brought to you by Optio. Optio is, if you haven't heard, an online Google Ads optimization software that has recently launched a entire new opportunity for managers to be able to get more out of their Google Ads. And not just Google Ads. It has now expanded to Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, LinkedIn. All of these networks are available for you to take your information, run it through the Optio system and get data like you've never seen before. Recommendations are just the tip of the iceberg. Of course, Optio still will help you optimize your campaigns, but now there is a built in AI integration so that you can chat with your data, you can analyze your data, you can find out why are certain things happening. So this is a whole new opportunity. If you have tried Optio in the past, I invite you to jump back in because this tool is growing and expanding very quickly. This has been a long project in the works for a while. You can try this for free at optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial. That's O-P-T-E-O.com PSP use that link and then let you know you heard about it right here on the podcast. All right, so let's start with my general advice about targeting your competitors in Google Ads. Here we go. My very first advice that I give is I don't think many of you should do it. So I'm gonna start right there because many times I don't think it's appropriate for most people to do it because they can't really afford their main keywords in the first place. Most Google Ads campaigns are restricted quite significantly just because of budget. Very few campaigns are able to fully saturate their core keywords and make sure that their ads are showing up all day, all the time, near the top of Google for what's most important to them. So for many of you, it's not something that I would expand and try because you're already highly underfunded, but let's say that you, you know, you do have some budget and you're willing to give this a test, maybe with carving off a little bit of budget or adding more budget just for this test. Let me give you another reason why I don't usually recommend it. Very often I find the leads for this type of campaign, the sales, if you can get them, are quite unmotivated to change their mind. So keep in mind, imagine you walk into a store and you're hoping to buy a certain widget and you realize you walked into the wrong store. You're looking at, this is not the product that I want. And the salesman says, no, no wait, this is a better product. You're immediately going to be unmotivated to change your mind. You were going to buy or look up one product. You happen to be misguided to the wrong product. Why would you change your mind? There's a hurdle that advertisers have to immediately overcome to even try and get someone to consider it. So you're already at a disadvantage because the person is not looking for you. And then if that doesn't convince you, the last thing that I see happens all the time. If you start bidding on a competitor term, you start showing up on those competitor terms. Many times when I see clients and people that I work with, the first thing they want to do is, well, let's do it back to them, right? They, the owner, the CEO of the company, whoever will see that, hey, a competitor showing up whenever someone searches our company name, well, let's do it to them. Let's do the same thing right back to them. So you could be inviting a bidding war on your own brand. Now people are going to be doing it to you, and now you're spending money on your own brand and on their brand. And meanwhile your core keywords are suffering because budget is going to these other areas that maybe isn't quite as important. So that's my quick suggestion on why I don't think many people should do it. Because it is, it is expensive and it can be quite frustrating in what it could possibly lead to as from, from the quality of the traffic to the quality of the leads, down to the fact that you've now made a, a Google enemy. You now have a, an arch villain that you're fighting against and you only brought it upon yourself. So if, if you do further insist upon doing it, let me take you through two scenarios why I find ways that it does work, some of my recommendations for the best way to do it, and then I'm going to tell you reasons why it often fails and then at the end I'm going to tell you exactly the settings that I would suggest if you were to proceed. Alright, so if you insist on running a competitor targeting Google Ads search campaign, here's the best way to make it work. Method number one, and this one's my favorite, is to take the brand or product or whatever it is you're bidding against and then only show up whenever someone does a search for price, cost review, reviews, estimate, you know, anything that relates to the fact that this person is researching this competitor name. If they search for a competitor name plus the word price or cost or reviews, you can probably assume that this person has not yet engaged with the company, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this. They would already know they'd already made the decision. So it's pre decision searches that you might be going after. What you don't want is something that is just the company name. Right, Just the company name by itself is not going to be ideal. That's not going to be something that I would recommend. It's going to be anyone who searches for that is what you're going to show up for. And then in the end it's not something that ends up to be highly motivated shoppers because they've already made a decision. Or maybe they're already in a relationship with that company for certain services or something like that, who knows. So pre decision shoppers are better in my opinion. Okay, target or method number two that you could do is this. You could target the name, the company name, the brand, but offer something better. Okay, let me explain what I mean by this. I'm specifically referring to not the keywords now, but the actual ad copy. So what you say in your headlines, so you run something targeting just their company name, just the product name, whatever. And then in the headlines you throw out any type, throw out any kind of generic messaging about who you are and essentially say here's why you should click on this ad, here's a price difference, a feature difference, a benefit or some value that trumps that other competitors. Here's why we do it better, here's what we can offer that is distinctly better than what they're doing. That could be a great motivator. That could be something that invites the person to click on the ad not because they thought that your ad was the competitor, but because you directly, You, you, you offer a, an argument, a reason for them to click on it because of something. So this should stop you. I mean if you don't have a reason and you don't offer anything significantly different, price, feature, benefit, value of some kind, then this should stop you from using that. So don't just make something up. Don't just say we're better because we say so. That's not what I'm talking about. I want something distinctive. And in fact I would go further. Even better would be a page. And this is method three if you want to throw in, you know, this one with the fir, with the number two. So number two is, you know, saying in the ad copy that you're better for certain reasons. The third one can coincide directly with that and you actually have a page that does a side by side comparison or you know, discusses in a easy to consume way. I don't want a wall of text. That's not something you want to present someone. Certainly nowadays people, many, many people are looking on their phones and you better hope they even give you a few moments of their time on their phone. So you need to make it brief and concise and easy to consume. So having a page that does a type of comparison or some type of logical argument about why this is a better choice and they should consider it, that is another great method. Okay, so there's. Those are three methods right there, right at the top of. If you do insist upon this, I find more success when you. And I'll briefly state them again, advertise directly against people who are searching for pre decision searches, price, cost review, estimate, something like that, someone in that sees the ad that specifically says this is why you should consider us, we're cheaper, we're faster, we're more experienced, you know, something like that. But then even better, method three is actually having a page to back that up. I've done that with other clients of mine where they, they directly say right in the ad, here is, you know, here's why, here's a chart, you know, a little checklist of they do this, this, this, but we do this, this, this, this, this, this, this. Right. I think that's great. So let me tell you why I think these often fail. So I've given you the positive. Let me give you four reasons why I think most of the time these competitor search campaigns fail and they're they. Number one, there's really no difference between what your competitor does and what you do. You both install roofs on houses, you just have a different company name than someone else. I mean, how I know all you out there that install roofs, you probably think you do it better than everyone else. But in reality, for the consumer, from their point of view, a roof is a roof. Can you do it cheaper than this guy? If you really can't, if there's not anything distinctively different, you're going to have a hard time convincing anyone on a competitor campaign to choose you because you have no distinction to set you apart. So if there's no real difference between what they do, what you do, I wouldn't pursue a competitor campaign because many of the methods that I described are not going to be something you can possibly even formulate because to the, to the customer, you have no distinction between your competitor and you. So reason number two, why this method often fails. Many people just send their competitor traffic, their, their competitor searches competitor campaign just to their homepage, just straight to their homepage. So there's no argument being made. There's nothing specific about why. It's just, hey, you were searching for this. Well, we're. That other thing that you didn't search for go to our homepage. And our homepage is just going to drop you on, you know, the same thing everyone else sees. No argument, no way to convince, no way to compare. Nothing, just the homepage. And even worse, this is something I am, I particularly think is a worse offense is when someone just clicks on the phone number in the ad. So there are multiple ways that someone can interact with your ad. One method is they can click on the headline and go to your website. Another one is the call asset in your ad. And if someone searches for a competitor name and then clicks your phone number, you know what's going to happen on that phone call? They're going to say, huh, who is this? Right? And you're going to say, huh, what? This is so and so. I wasn't calling. So, so. Oh, well, you want to talk to me? No, I don't want to talk to you. I mean this is, that's even if they, it's even if they ask, they may hear you, they may hear the operator or whoever answer the phone with your company name and immediately just hang up because they're like, oh, that wasn't who I was calling. So and guess what? That call cost you money. Just like the click cost you money to your homepage, that call cost you money. So sending people to a phone number, sending people to, you know, through, through a call asset in Google Ads or a homepage that just drops them on the homepage, it's not effective. It's not really going to work. Number Reason 3 is as I already discussed, you can't afford it. It's pulling traffic from your current website. So I discussed that already. You can't afford what you're already doing. You're already strained for budget. The campaigns only have a 30% search impression share anyway. You're not really delivering much on the keywords that matter. I wouldn't suggest the direction. And then number four, reason number four is the company that they were looking for, they're already familiar with. You have an uphill battle to introduce them to a new option, something they weren't familiar with and then convince them to change their mind. That's a difficult thing to do. Those are the four reasons why I find that most of the time they don't work. So with that, if you would like to proceed and you are still intent on trying it, I'm going to give you my specific campaign suggestions about what to do and the best way to keep this as lean and efficient as possible because these can, these can very easily turn into very expensive endeavors. So let's get into that. Remind you again, opteo.com is my sponsor. This whole podcast is brought to you by them. They are my one and only sponsor for many years now. I greatly appreciate their sponsorship and you can say thanks to me by going to optio.com PSP and giving them a try that keeps them supporting me, which means I can support you. Alright, so let's get into my recommendations. My obviously very neglectful to even give these because I'm not a big fan of it but I have had sometimes very trying to think, I mean maybe two times in my life, maybe one where I've seen this work successfully on an extended period and verified the quality of the leads. So it's, it's not, it's not very often but here we go. Here are my recommendations on how you should proceed as far as specific details. Number one, this campaign should be separate from all other campaigns. You should have this. Everything that I've talked about and going to talk about should all be done in a separate campaign with this own budget. If you don't know what a campaign is, there are campaigns and then there's ad groups. Campaigns are the ones that have the budget attached to them. Ad groups can have bids and ad groups have the keywords inside of them. The campaign is the, the overall housing facility that the ad groups fit inside of. So don't just put these into an ad group into your current campaigns. No, this should be a separate campaign with its own dedicated budget. Ideally start small with a budget and then grow from there. But it should be a separate campaign. Alright, so number two, this one may not believe me. You may think, oh, Kris, I can't do that. But I'm telling you, you should run this as a manual bid campaign. I do not think any other bidding strategy is appropriate. Maximize conversions is not appropriate because it's not really about conversions at the beginning. It's just about showing up near the top, just getting your ad to the top and maximize conversions or maximize conversion value. Either one of those are even target CPA are going to try and prioritize traffic based on audience and all these other factors that don't really matter. You just need to show up and you need to show up near the top. Not necessarily first, but you need to show up high. Okay, so showing up for that, I think just comes down to manual bidding. And you think, well, Kris, I can't do manual. They got rid of manual bidding. No, no, they didn't. You can still set up a campaign with manual bidding. I promise you you can. It's hidden in the, in the campaign settings. You go to the bidding settings and then you go, you change the bidding strategy and then you click the not recommended area and that's where they've hidden the manual bidding. It is still there. I promise you. I use it every day. I build campaigns every day. And there, it's always there. And, and as I've said for years, it always will be. I've had many people email me and say, Chris, you, I don't know why you talk about manual bidding. It's going away. Let's pause for a minute and, and just enjoy the fact that Chris was right. It's not gone. It's not going anywhere. Okay, so number three, I highly recommend that you only use exact match. Exact match. My goodness. Don't use broad. And I highly advise not using phrase. What you want is to only show up when they do a very specific search. So just the company name or just the business name, plus the word reviews or price or cost, you know, whatever you're going after here, exact match only you don't need to cover every iteration because what will Happen is you'll show up on the company name plus the search for address. You want to show up whenever someone's looking up the address or the phone number of your competitor. Bad idea. Don't bid on that. They obviously are already well invested into this other competitor. Leave that alone. You do not want to show up on other variations other than just the company name or company name price, cost review, something like that. Okay, so exact match only. Manual bidding only in its own campaign. And last two is this. I highly recommend you pin your headlines in your ad copy. So you pin specific messages in your ad copy. So you know, you don't just let Google pick your headlines for you. Goodness gracious, don't let AI do it either. Piece of trash suggestions. Absolute crap. So you want to write these in a way that I described earlier in the podcast, where they actually have concrete reasoning about why your ad is showing up against a competitor, why they should click your ad. Don't just throw generic ads on there. Have something concrete, convince them. Offer something above and beyond what the competitor's doing, Give them a reason, and then pin those to the first headline. Pin those to the second headline. Who cares if your ad rank is poor? I am. I'm done with ad Rank. Ad Rank is a frigging joke. I run poor ads all the time because I, I want. Sometimes I just need to control my headlines. Sometimes I need to control my messaging. And who cares if my ad rank is poor? I'm getting what I want out of the ads whether you like it or not. Google. And then last is, I highly suggest limiting your ads through the ad scheduler. Set your ads to only show during, you know, prime time of the day. Maybe it's, maybe it's 9am to 2pm right? A few hours. Do not show them first thing in the morning because you know who's likely to be searching, you know, and, and doing stuff like that? The owner of the business. You know, people in that business could be going in and every morning it's their routine to go in and search and then click on the competitors that are on their name. I mean, that absolutely could be happening. I suggest going after that window of probably the most likely time when the most valuable Traffic, you know, 9:00am, 2:00pm, something like that, don't show in the evenings, don't show it on the weekends, unless that's important for your business for some reason. But I suggest limiting it to a narrow window, a key time of the day. Not all day. Absolutely not all day. Okay, so that is it. That is the end. I hope that was useful. I hope that I have scared away many of you from doing a competitor campaign and for those of you that are intent on still doing it, I hope that you do it smarter and better because of these suggestions. If you'd like to chat with me, I am very reachable, very easy to get in touch with. Chris Schaefer.com you can hire me for management of your Google Ads. It's a monthly management fee. I think you'll find it to be a very affordable fee and I also do coaching where you can meet with me one on one, go through your campaign together and I can make changes, adjust, build, you know, give advice, answer questions that probably no one else can to tell you the truth. Humble brag, but that's the way it is. I would be happy to help. Chris Schaefer.com Otherwise the rest of you, I will catch you here next week.