Let’s imagine that you wake up one morning, get to the office and decide to check the analytics of your website. On this particular day, you ask yourself, “Hm, we are having low traffic today, what seems to be the issue?”

To troubleshoot, you decide to do a Google search, and you discover that your website has been replaced by your competition on the paid search top result. Now, once your competition takes the number one spot, you need to come up with a proper way of fixing the problem. Businesses make approximately $2 for every dollar spent on Google Ads. You don’t want to play around with your ad campaign.

Is it legal for your competition to bid on the name of your brand? Well, it seems unfair, but Google will not restrict or investigate the use of trademarks as keywords. This means that you cannot claim to own your own keywords. Competitors have the right to trade in your grounds and outbid you on your keywords.

Having that in mind, you need to know the strategies to bounce back instead of making things worse. So, take a seat and let’s discuss what you need to do.

Identify the Extent of the Damage

Google search is the easiest target for competitors. Once the competition affects this side, it may have caused damage on other search engines too. Additionally, there are other serious competitors who can go after your brand on Google partners and various websites.

Who are Google search partners? They are businesses and websites that partner with Google AdWords to offer native searchers with results. Some of them include Amazon, Dogpile, and AOL.

Once the damage is on Google AdWords, then the probability that damage is across other partnering websites is high. Since Google is not obligated to disclose the name of its partners, check out the following list of few known Google’s AdWords search partners:

www.alexa.com
www.amazon.com
www.aol.com
www.askjeeves.com
www.biglobe.ne.jp
www.bizrate.com
www.btopenworld.com
www.comcast.net
www.cs.com
www.dealtime.com
www.dogpile.com
www.earthlink.com
www.excite.com
www.froogle.com
www.go.com (includes www.disney.com)
www.infospace.com
www.libero.it
www.mamma.com
www.metacrawler.com
www.mysearch.com
www.myway.com
www.netscape.com
www.nifty.com
www.nytimes.com
www.searchalot.com
www.searchresult.net
www.sportsline.com
www.sympatico.ca
www.teoma.com
www.updated.com
www.washingtonpost.com
www.webcrawler.com
www.yahoo.co.jp

To exhaustively determine how far the damage to your PPC campaign has reached, extend the search to all Google partners like Amazon and Dogpile.

To have a better idea of where to check, find each website that your competitor outranks you on and discover the type of audience they are targeting. This search will also help you to know how much they are spending to go after your market. You should also go ahead and run ads on Yahoo and Bing to have a good picture of the damage caused on these search engines.

Finally, you should check your click-through rate (CTR). This is the last determiner of how damaging the ad campaign has become. If you discover that your click-through rate is okay, then you don’t have to worry about planning for further action.

The following benchmarks state the average rate of click-through across all industries, however, it’s advisable that you compare your CTR to a previous period when there was less or no competition on your brand or trademark keywords/terms

Image from https://www.wordstream.com/average-ctr

By now, you should have a good perspective of the extent of damage on your ad campaign. Let us now look at the actions you can take.

Report to Google

Earlier on, I said that Google might not help you in this matter. But it also depends on how your competitor is exploiting your brand searches.

Your competition should only target brand keywords without infringing on your trademark. When this occurs, you have no grounds of reporting them. But if they are using your trademark name in their ad copy then they are in trouble. You can report them to Google by clicking here.

Before you go through this process, ensure that the phrase your competition is using is officially trademarked. If not, you might go through a difficult process that will not bear fruit. Remember to act quickly and report issues as soon as observed in order to minimize the damage to your campaign and business

Ask your competition to take it down

You might determine that the competitor’s ad campaign is negatively impacting your traffic, sales, or the generation of your leads without breaking any one of the trademark laws. Once you make this discovery, you should immediately try to reach out to them and ask them to stop. This is not going to be a pretty discussion. The truth is that it does not have to be pretty. The goal of the request should be to ask them to stop using your keywords for the sake of fair play.

If your click-through rate and ad position have been affected, then any awkward conversation you are going to have with your competitor is worthwhile. The best thing about this step is that you have the potential of solving the issue easily with a polite request. Below is an email draft you can use:

“Hi, Hope you’re well. We’ve noticed that you are bidding on our brand keywords (please see attached screenshot) and this is negatively affecting our customers’ and potential customers’ search experience. We would like to avoid responding in kind and causing a brand bidding war that will inflate CPCs for both of us and remove any advantage. As such, we would greatly appreciate it if you would consider stopping the activity. Many thanks. Kind regards, x”
Example of letter

There are people who may consider your request because of your approach. There are those who will not be moved. If nothing changes, we are now going to look at what you can do.

Spend More On Your Branded Ad

It’s now time to shift the gear to a new speed. If you want to beat your competition, you have to spend more on your brand’s keywords. You need to increase the expense to what your competition is currently operating at. It’s not a sweet step to spend more on your branded keywords, but that is how the game has to be played once the competition starts stepping on your toes. You don’t have an alternative. Thankfully, as your quality score will be much higher for your own brand keywords (compared to your competitors bidding on them) your CPCs will be much lower than what the competitors will be paying to show ads on your brand terms; further increasing your CPCs will also increase theirs and hopefully price them out of bidding on your keywords in the long term.

To solidify your number one position on Google, you have to spend on paid searches. This step will help you to ensure that people find you anytime they are searching for your brand. You want to provide people with a better experience when they search your brand using your keywords. You also want to have the advantage of being ahead of your competition with paid searches.

Take Your Quality Score to New Heights

Google determines the quality of your ads by deciding whether they are of high or low quality, based primarily on the relevance of your keywords and ads to your landing page. This is an important metric to consider. When you have a good quality score, you will spend less per click.

The quality score is measured within a scale of 1 to 10. A higher score will make your ads rank higher on the search engines, all other things being equal. When you go to Google AdWords, you can view your quality score at a keyword level. But how can you increase it? It is important to understand what you need to do to increase the quality score.

One of the hacks is to increase your click-through rate. To do this, you can optimize the ad copy. Check out the difference below:

The second option is vague. It will not offer any quality incentive to anyone who clicks on it. On the diagram above, the “good” copy indicates the rating, the price you expect to pay, and the ad extensions such as the sitelinks at the bottom. You can borrow this approach to boost your click-through rate. Once your quality score is higher, you have the probability of taking the first position.

Compete With Them By Bidding On Their Brand

Once your competitor makes the first move towards your brand’s keywords, the last play you have might be to make a move on their brand. Since the business environment thrives on competition, you have to be civil while going after your competitor’s customers. Avoid harmful ads that target the reputation of your competitors.

Conclusion

Protecting your brand searches is something that needs to be well thought through. Instead of waiting for brand search wars to happen, weigh all the pros and cons and consider the best ways of solving any dispute.

How to Protect Your Brand Searches From Being Exploited By Your Competition