Watch Episode 4 on "Competitor Names":
← Watch Episode 3 on “Names” Part I | Watch Episode 5 on “Technology” →
Read the Transcript of Episode 4 on "Competitor Names":
What's up everybody, Wil Reynolds here for another Wasteful Wednesday.
Today, we're going to go back to bidding on competitor names.
The words around the brand “Seer Interactive” can tell you a lot about someone's intent, and I'm going to share with you some of the words that I've typically found that we just know to negate because they have never performed well for clients.
However, Google is saying "oh, that word is performing for you overall," so we like to get super granular and help make sure that our PPC team can be the freaking heroes for their clients by knocking out inefficient spend and getting those CPAs really low.
Keyword of the Week: "Competitor Names"
Ex. Locations
Query: "Headquarters/HQ"
I'm looking at the word "Seer Interactive".
People can bid on my [company] name all day, go for it, but when they put in the word "HQ", what do you think they're looking for? That "HQ" at the end of Seer Interactive can tell you a little bit about this person's intent.
Go into your own paid data, look at your search queries, and tell me if you bid on competitor names, I guarantee there's been times where people have addresses in, HQ, headquarters, etc.
You ultimately are probably landing people on a page like this for this person on bidding on my brand name:
If it's not really going to answer the user's question, you'd be better off just putting up your company's address.
Ex. Company related terms
Query: "LLC"
Another big one that I have found is "LLC".
So when people put the word LLC at the end of the competitor name, very often, we find that those words do not perform well at all because those people are looking for something very different.
[When bidding on competitor names look for terms] like "CEO", "C levels", people's names in your company, etc.
Be very, diligent, my friends, you do not want to be spending money on competitor names and the words that come after them. You're probably better off exact matching on the competitor name alone and not all the other words that are around it.
As you can see, when I searched for Seer Interactive [the surrounding terms did not match the competitor's goal, the same can go for]:
- "Glassdoor"
- "Internships"
- "Salary"
- "Logo"
- "Blog"
Most of these words are not the type that you want to pay to show up for.
Key Takeaways
- Use your SEO and PPC data together to identify whether or not your PPC ads are matching to competitor terms that don't match intent
- Identify whether you should exact match your competitor names campaigns
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