Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 137 - Competitor Myths

It has come to my attention that not enough people actually understand what you can do with competitor targeting in Google Ads. 

For example, you may think that the main reason you shouldn't put a competitor's name in your ad text is because of trademark issues, but that's actually not the problem at all. 

So, in today's episode, I'm going to break down common competitor targeting myths, let you know what the Google Ads policy actually says, and what you can do if you want to get good results out of targeting competitor queries. 

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google and now I work for you.

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 137: Competitor Myths.

So, first thing’s first, what do we mean when we talk about competitor targeting? 

That's when you use searches for your competitor as your keywords. 

For example, let's say that you are me Jyll Saskin Gales and you want to be sneaky and show an ad when someone searches for “Amalia Fowler.” I could put Amalia Fowler as a keyword in my campaign. And so when someone searches for “Amalia,” I'm eligible to show an ad for “Jyll” instead. 

What I've just described is allowed by Google policy and is legal in many countries. But I'm just going to say here, and I'll keep repeating it, this is not legal advice. Please consult with a lawyer if you have any doubt about whether or not you should use these strategies.

So what are the potential issues with Jyll advertising to people searching for “Amalia?” 

First, there are some potential issues if I were to put Amalia's name as a headline. 

So, for example, if someone searches “Amalia Fowler” and the headline of my ad says “Amalia Fowler,” but sadly I am not Amalia. I am Jyll Sakin Gales. That is not a trademark issue, first of all. While trademark issues can come into play with competitor targeting, that only matters if your competitor has trademarked their name. And in many cases, they haven't. So, trademarks are not the issue here. 

The actual issue? Misrepresentation. Specifically, it is considered unacceptable business practices to, and I quote, “Impersonate other brands or businesses in your ads or on your website to hide your identity or imply connections or qualifications.” Meaning, you can't pretend to be something else. 

So putting the headline “Amalia Fowler” when people search “Amalia Fowler” that actually runs a muck of Google policies because I am impersonating or pretending to be a business I am not. And that gets at the core of one of the key issues with competitor targeting.

Now in some countries there's also a potential legal issue. Again, I am not a lawyer, but wherever you live, you're going to want to look up this concept of consumer confusion, which usually means something like, would a reasonable person, when searching for a thing and seeing your ad that mentions the competitor in the headline, would a reasonable person expect that you are that competitor? If so, you might be breaking the law. 

And here's a real life example of this, which actually prompted me to create this episode. Darren Shaw is a local SEO expert. He runs a company called Whitespark and he recently shared a screenshot on LinkedIn of when he searched Whitespark and the second search ad headline just said Whitespark. But guess what? It was not his ad. 

The ad actually came from Moz, which is an SEO software platform. So what Moz is doing right here is against Google policy and, although I am not a lawyer, likely against the law in Canada where Darren is based and likely against the law in the US where I believe Moz is based. 

Now to be very clear I don't want to denigrate Moz here. Darren posted about it. They reached out right away and said it was an accident. Stopped doing it.

But here's the next key thing I want to get at. You may want to target competitors. You may not want to target competitors. Regardless of what you want, Google might be doing it anyway. 

So, first I'm going to share what you need to do to make sure you're not unintentionally breaking the law like Moz says they were. And like I've seen so many other examples of this. And then before we round out today, I'm going to share what you can actually do to target competitors in a way that is policy compliant and might actually drive great results.

How can you end up unintentionally targeting competitors? Well, if you're using Phrase Match keywords, Broad Match keywords, AI Max, PMax, or Shopping, then you could be eligible to serve on searches for competitors. 

So, for example, if I have “Jyll Saskin Gales” as an Exact Match keyword, I'm not going to serve on people searching for “Amalia,” but any other kind of match type or keywordless targeting, Google absolutely would understand that we are both Google Ads practitioners. We're both thought leaders. We're both content creators. Same same, right? Similar intent. 

Now, importantly, that doesn't mean you're actually going to break policy, right? It means I could serve on searches for “Amalia Fowler,” but how could I end up actually having a headline that does something wrong here? This could happen if you have text customization enabled. So, that's an AI Max feature as of right now. AI Max for Search, probably also coming to AI Max for Shopping when that launches. And this could also happen in Performance Max if you have text customization enabled. So if you don't want to do this, either turn text customization off, or turn it on, but make sure you have guidelines in place that make clear you don't want to serve on any competitors.

And then if you don't want to serve on competitor searches at all—let's say I just want to advertise to people searching for “Jyll Saskin Gales” or “Jyll Saskin” or “Inside Google Ads,” but not other people—the simplest way is to play whack-a-mole with negatives. Every time you see a competitor's name pop up: negative, negative, negative.

Another way to do it would be to use brand exclusions and then put in your competitors there.

Then there's a third feature that's part of AI Max right now: control branded searches with brand inclusions and exclusions. So I could do a brand inclusion for just things that include the brand “Jyll” and/or exclusion for things that include “Amalia.”

And then lastly, this wouldn't make sense in a branded campaign, but AI Max does have an option to show ads only on unbranded searches. So, changing our example for a second, let's say I want to advertise to people looking for a “Google Ads Coach,” and I'm finding that I'm serving ads on people searching for “Amalia Fowler” or “Sarah Stemen” or other people in the industry, and I don't want that at all. And I also don't want to advertise to people searching for “Jyll Saskin Gales” because they're going to find me anyway. I only want to advertise to those non-brand searches like “Google Ads Coach,” “Google Ads Consultant,” “Help with Google Ads,” etc. I could use AI Max and then turn on the feature to show ads only on non-branded searches. And that would ensure that, for the most part, I'm not serving on any brands at all, just on non-brand search.

It's this combination of the keywordless targeting and the text customization with no limits that can cause you to inadvertently break policy. Because you know what? If you show the competitor's name in your ad text and people think you are the competitor, yeah, you're going to see a really high click-through rate and your CPCs are not going to be super high the way they typically are with search conquesting. 

This is one of those examples of Google Ads doing exactly what you told it to do, but not at all what you want it to do. So, when in doubt, turn text customization off. And when in further doubt, you can either use brand exclusions or negative keywords or the AI Max brand features to ensure you're not advertising on competitors.

Now, what if you do want to advertise on competitor searches, but you don't want to break policy? 

Again, I'm not going to speak to the law because that's different by every country, but here is an example I'm going to share with you from a client of mine who noticed that there were a lot of these searches for a certain competitor coming into their non-brand Search campaign and it was driving up their CPCs because obviously their ad wasn't very relevant to that and we wanted to do something about it. 

So, what they did first is create a specific landing page. I'm not going to reveal my client's name. So, we're just going to do Jyll versus Amalia, okay? Where Jyll is my client and Amalia is the competitor.

They noticed a lot of searches for “Amalia” and thought, let's create a landing page about Jyll versus Amalia with the pros and cons of when it makes sense to choose us. Obviously stacking the deck in their favor a little bit, right? But being 100% truthful. That's a key part of the law in many places. You can't lie or deceive consumers.

Once they had this Jyll versus Amalia landing page ready, then we created a new ad group to start, and it eventually became its own campaign, for searches for “Jyll Amalia,” “Amalia Jyll,” “Jyll or Amalia,” “Amalia versus Jyll,” targeting people who were explicitly looking for that comparison.

And then because of that they had a headline that said “Jyll or Amalia?” Now they were using their competitor's name in their ad text but in a way that's policy compliant. They're not implying that they are Amalia. Right? This is Jyll making a very clear fair comparison.

And then if people do search for that, that ad is exactly what they're looking for. They click on it, then they get to a landing page, it's exactly what they're looking for. So what's great about this is they were able to have high quality score, normal CPCs for them, strong click-through rate, and yes, strong conversion rate, and good results because they were taking searches not for the straight competitor to start, but for people who were comparing them to the competitor, addressing it with ads, and solving the problem.

After that, they then expanded the keyword set to target people straight up looking for the competitor. So, for example, previously they were only using Exact Match keywords if the keyword contained both “Jyll” and “Amalia.” Now, they added in keywords that were just people looking for “Amalia.” 

But again, the ad text is comparing Jyll versus Amalia. Landing page comparing Jyll versus Amalia. This expanded the reach, but we're using target CPA bidding, so it didn't go crazy. It only bid on those auctions where it thought there was a good chance it could convert. 

And they saw very strong results for this. Their cost per conversion from these competitor comparison campaigns versus their standard non-brand campaigns was actually better. Lower CPA, more conversions, really happy with it. And now they're considering expanding the strategy to have dedicated landing pages comparing their product to other competitors. So we can then build ad groups and ads, etc. to match. 

That's how you can actually target your competitors without breaking Google policy. Drawing fair comparisons, ensuring that what you're saying is truthful, not trying to mislead consumers, just answering their questions. Which one should I choose? This or that?

One more time, I will repeat. If you're in doubt, consult with a lawyer before trying any kind of new competitor targeting strategy. 

To wrap up for today, it's something that has grinded my gears recently when I see people dropping misinformation about what you can and can't do with competitor targeting. So, I hope this clears it up for you. 

Yes, you can target your competitors. You just have to do it the right way, which is the way that's policy compliant, legal in your jurisdiction, and zooming out from all of that, ethical, and fair and accurate. 

If you'd like my help building out your own competitor strategy, you can book your own Google Ads coaching call with me at jyll.ca. That’s J-Y-L-L dot C-A. 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time inside Google Ads.