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An e-commerce marketing strategy involves many ways to customize advertising, including targeting competitors. This approach has its advantages and disadvantages, solves some issues but creates others, allows you to get a loyal audience, but you can also get a lot of negative feedback. So how do you set up ads on competitors, why might you need it, and how do you do it in Google Ads? Let us consider these questions in the article of the ADV Advantage blog.
Reasons to run ads on the audience of competitors
Globally, any advertising has two main goals: to draw the audience’s attention to the brand and to get conversions. These marketing strategies always work in combination, but in different proportions to each other and to the budget.
When might you need to advertise against competitors? This strategy has two goals:
- creating an alternative for existing brands;
- raising brand awareness through the status of competitors.
In the first case, a brand that creates advertising for its competitor draws attention to itself by creating a new offer for the market. That is, the company provides services with tangible benefits for customers or sells products that differ from those existing within the same industry. This increases competition and gives potential customers more choices.
The second case involves positioning a new brand in the same context as competitors, as something similar in status. Placing your own advertising alongside existing companies also allows you to get a percentage of the interested audience.
Disadvantages of targeting competitors’ audiences
The above arguments raise logical questions about the ethics of such a strategy. Of course, in this case, there is a growing likelihood of escalating conflicts among competitors, or even violating the law. When developing a marketing strategy for a competitor’s audience, you should follow ethical standards and not violate business rules. The Google Ads Help contains a number of rules regarding the legality of a particular marketing strategy or the content of an advertising campaign.
Another purely technical drawback is the high cost per click on an ad, as similar campaigns use the same keywords and audiences. This is especially true for local businesses that advertise online.
Advantages of advertising to competitors
Advertising to the audience of competitors in Google Ads has a number of obvious advantages, including
- creating an interested target audience
- attracting new customers;
- increasing the degree of trust due to the status of competitors;
- creating opportunities for comparison and offering advantages;
- understanding the company’s development path.
The key aspect of launching competitor targeting is to create a truly alternative offer, without which it will be difficult to imagine this industry in the future. If the main goal is just to redirect the audience, then this idea is a failure in advance. Loyal users need significant reasons to abandon their chosen brand in favor of something new and unknown.
How to find competitors and create ads for them?
Usually, market analysis and search for competitors is carried out at the stage of preparing a new business for launch. For a local business, it is enough to research the activities of a company offering similar goods and services within the city/region. For a geographically wide online business, the list of competitors should be much larger. In this case, you should familiarize yourself with the search queries in the keyword planner in your Google Ads account. You should select those companies that use relevant search queries and keywords. Individual websites can also be analyzed for keywords to determine the main areas of their activity.
When working with the audience of competitors, you should define the goals you are pursuing in advance. To attract the audience to get to know the brand, it is recommended to create a Google Ads display advertising campaign. Multimedia banners, images, videos, and other creatives encourage the audience to interact without additional obligations. You can add the names of competing brands as keywords to your display ads, as well as select their websites separately.
To get conversions according to this marketing strategy, it is recommended to create search ads with relevant keywords and a list of negative keywords that directly relate to another brand. In this case, you shouldn’t create a dynamic “{Keyword:}” insertion, as such search ads will include the names of competitors. Instead, it is better to focus on adding your own logos and creating headlines that directly emphasize the benefits of your business.
By the way, Google Discovery campaigns allow you to easily add user intent, thereby targeting competitors’ audiences, but this only works on the Google Discovery network. Additionally, you can create YouTube ads that will be shown between individual videos on your competitors’ channel. To do this, just select the appropriate placements in the YouTube campaign settings and monitor where the ad was shown.
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