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Going head to head with a competitor bidding on our brand name – best Strategy?
Hey folks,
So we’ve been dealing with a competitor with a similar-sounding name aggressively bidding on our brand keyword.
We’re using Target CPA set at $30 with a budget of $2k per day.
-99.71% impression share
-94% search abs. top IS
-97% click share
-$2.40 avg CPC
-1.83 ROAS (1.7 is breakeven)
Without this aggressive competitor, our CPC on this campaign is usually around $1-1.50, and ROAS is around 2.5-3. It seems we’re running an optimized campaign based on the metrics, but this POS is driving up our costs out of spite.
I’m just not sure how to approach this in terms of bidding strategy moving forward. If I’m getting 97% click share, is this guy even spending any money here, or straight-up driving up my costs? Should I lower the target CPA? I can’t stand losing even 1% abs top IS to this assclown. Is the tradeoff here really about being at the top of the page for our brand name, vs being profitable?
There are no amicable solutions to be had here.
Here are Google’s projections: https://imgur.com/a/A3esTAc
Any and all advise is appreciated!
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7 Replies
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First off, Google’s predictions are useless. Second, if he’s nodding on your brand name inhis keyword you can ask google to make him stop. But you’ll need to show you have a trademark first.
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What is your QS like? Should be 10 for your own brand and that should cheapen your cpc.
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Write better ad copy and make people want to click your ad and convert. When you have competitors bidding on your name, it’s a lot harder to get to 100% on at metrics.
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I’d be more interested in what auction insights says than looking for answers in Google’s estimated budget tool.
If you’re at mid to high 90s on everything there isn’t much more you can do besides raising budgets to have a higher search rank.
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In short: outbid and out-relevance them. Brand name clicks are usually cents per click, and use the ads in a creative way.
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First of all, what is pulling through the search terms report? Even with exact only, with close variants you could be getting some non-brand query volume completely skewing the KPI’s. Brand noise could also be a concern out of context, and that alone could explain struggling to break even on “brand”.
What Google is telling you with this projection, is that you could spend 15% more for an additional four impressions, using a 3X current CPA bid. To maybe, maybe, make another $170 revenue. So eliminate automation to exert additional control over your brand campaign as well.
Like u/fathom53 pointed out, ad copy/messaging is also extremely important. Control, control, control the brand campaign variables, and a distinct performance difference in general UVP messaging is a ‘winner” as a new control across the board.
As is, you’re still making a couple of points to reinvest. So direct that to your competitor campaign. Anyone in your highest level remarketing list actively searching for a (that) competitor has above average value. It goes both ways captain. 🙂
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Run your brand in its own campaign so you have better control over bids, budget, and monitoring performance. Run manual bidding there and place your bids high enough that you’re getting 95%+ absolute top impression share.
Add any negatives for low performing queries.
When the campaign is “clean” you can switch to target impression share bidding if you wish. But this is one campaign type where manual bidding works just fine since you just want to be top of results and you have very high quality scores relative to competition.
Done.
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