Let's Build a Competitor Conquest Campaign! (Episode 530)

0:19Chris Schaeffer: Hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and I am going to talk about conquest campaigns. As the title says, let's build a conquest campaign. And what you see, ladies and gentlemen, here is a trap. That's not actually what we're going to do in this podcast. I tricked you because I want to talk about conquest campaigns. I'm going to talk about what they are, what the gold is, if you haven't heard of it, if you have heard of it. But by the end, this was a trap because I'm going to tell you why you shouldn't build a conquest campaign. I'm going to tell you my experience and the ugly truth about these agencies that use this fancy conquest term.

1:08Chris Schaeffer: And it sounds like it's a great addition to your strategy, but in reality, it's not. And I'm going to lay out the reasoning, the real world examples about what this is and what it's not, and why you shouldn't spend your advertising dollars towards it. And that is the topic of today's show. Hi, my name is Chris Schaefer, and I tricked you. So if you want to stick around, I appreciate it. I do this podcast every single week. I've been working in Google Ads for 23, 24 years now, and it's all I do. I manage Google Ads campaigns for customers all around the world. and I'm going to share my vast wealth of knowledge with you for free.

2:00Chris Schaeffer: I don't have a Patreon. You don't have to pay for this. It's entirely free, and the point is to hopefully make the PPC world a bit less confusing, a little more safe for those of you who are venturing into this area, and I'm going to help you avoid one of the potholes that I believe takes a lot of money from people's pocket, and that is competitor campaigns, sometimes referred to as conquest campaigns. So let's talk about what it is. Before I discuss that, I want to tell you about how this podcast is made possible from Optio. So if you haven't heard of Optio, it is an online software that can help you get more out of your Google Ads campaigns.

2:52Chris Schaeffer: So it is essentially a power tool to help you dig through and find ways to improve the performance of your search campaigns, your performance max campaigns, your shopping campaigns. It does anything and everything in Google ads to help you find an edge to beat your competitors, because that's what we're talking about here. And if you need a way to improve your ad copy or you just need to, why has the conversion rate gone down or why is my CPC increasing? This tool will provide answers as though you're an intelligent, well understood person instead of just telling you click here and fix it. It's going to give you the reasoning.

3:39It's going to lay out its argument about, well, here's what it's seen in the account. Here's what has happened in the past.

3:47Chris Schaeffer: And it's going to suggest things to you for you to make the decision. So it's a smart man's interface to help you improve your campaigns a step at a time. It's not a wonder tool where you just click and it does it for you. It's going to work with you. So if you're interested in trying this for free, you can try it for 28 days for free. It's a generous offer directly from Optio just for my listeners. That's optio.com slash psp, optio.com slash psp for a 28-day free trial. Just chat with them on the page, tell them you heard about it here, and they'll give you that free offer, and you're going to like it.

4:31It's been a favorite of my listeners for many years. All right, let's get into conquest campaigns.

4:43Chris Schaeffer: First, let's define it. What is a conquest campaign? All right, so a conquest campaign, sometimes referred to as a competitor campaign, is where you bid on a competitor's name or trademarked product. so if you are company XYZ and you're going to be bidding against a competitor that sells the same thing as you and their their name is competitor ABC you would bid you would actually have keywords that are competitor ABC and your your company XYZ so you don't bid on your terms you bid on their name their company name or if they have a product maybe their product is product ABC, and you are company XYZ, you actually bid on their product, their service, their software, whatever it is that you hope to grab the attention of their potential customers and what we'll find out to be probably current customers, you bid on that in an effort to, and here's what the goal is of a conquest campaign.

5:52The goal is to offer a compelling alternative to those that are looking for that particular company, that service, that software, that product.

6:04Chris Schaeffer: So you are hoping by jumping up and down and raising your hand in the air that they'll notice you, click on you and change their mind and decide on using your service, calling you instead, booking you instead, purchasing your product instead of theirs. so one of the first things that people often say is Chris is this okay to do is Google okay with this and the answer is yes there is absolutely nothing that can stop you from bidding on a competitor's name in your keywords putting your competitor's name in your keyword list is not something that you're going to run across any policy issues or disapprovals.

6:56You can absolutely do it. There's no reason why you wouldn't be able to do it. Google's not going to penalize you. There is no formal policy against that. Google, you know, it's an open field of keywords and you can choose what you want to choose in your keywords. Now, is there a risk? Is there an area that Google does frown upon? The answer is yes. There is a risk of doing it, specifically when it comes to the ad copy, because you can't just pick keywords. You have to write ad copy as well. So for this reason, there is a stopping point. You can't advertise on competitor ABC and then put competitor ABC in your ad copy.

7:48And that is especially true if competitor ABC is a trademarked term.

7:57Chris Schaeffer: So if that company has gone so far as to trademark their company name, which is not just something you just shout into the void. You don't just say, I am trademarked. There's a formal process to that, and that trademark has to be submitted to Google. So it's not as though just because they say it's trademarked or they put a little TM next to it, that doesn't mean anything. It has to be trademarked, and it has to be filed with Google. If they have done that, you can now run ads, but you'll be disapproved. Anyone can put competitor ABC in their ad copy, but if that company has trademarked competitor ABC as an actual term, it will be blocked from showing in your ad copy.

8:48Your ad will be disapproved. so you think well i don't think you know joe's tires down the road has gone to the effort of copywriting uh their their tire company's name all right it's just a little local shop so i'm gonna put that in my ad copy well let's say that your competitor has not trademarked their terms. What then would hold you back from doing that?

9:19Chris Schaeffer: Well, I'll tell you, anyone who puts a competitor name, most often it leads to one of two scenarios. Number one is some kind of legal action. Once the owner or someone sees that, very often it leads to a cease and desist, some kind of legal action, you know, hopefully cease and desist and then you stop and then it ends there. But sometimes it goes beyond that. Someone is very, it's a very personal thing to have your business directly targeted with your business name. I mean, there's no question at all that you have done this directly to them and impersonated them. It's a really personal thing.

10:02I would say it's quite dirty. And for that reason, the second

10:06Chris Schaeffer: situation also happens as well, retaliation. The company can do the same thing to you. And this is especially devastating if that company is much larger than you. Maybe they turn their eyes from what they're doing and someone in the marketing team just whips up a quick campaign with your company name in it, targets you and throws a quick 10 grand on it. I mean, you're in trouble. Your little$500 a month is not going to be able to protect you. Now you're in a situation where when your company name is searched, every single time that competitor shows up and good luck telling them that you're sorry.

11:01Chris Schaeffer: Hey, let's call it even. Sorry, can you turn off your campaign, I'll turn off mine. I mean, them spending 5K, 10K may be nothing to them, and they're willing to do it to absolutely devastate your control of your own name. So, I mean, this is something that you certainly would want to be careful about. And the reason I mention this scenario is because often you don't target people that are smaller than you. Most of the time, these conquest campaigns are targeted on bigger advertisers, larger advertisers. And so therefore, if they turn your direct, if you've distracted them from what they're doing, and so suddenly they're noticing you, you know, their budgets are often much larger, bigger teams, and maybe they take the time to target you with their much larger budget, much more aggressive bids and larger budget.

12:06This is a bad situation.

12:08Chris Schaeffer: So it's very dangerous. So keep that in mind. But I wanted to at least define what a conquest campaign is. At the very end, I'm going to give you my suggestion about what I think you should do with your conquest campaigns and maybe some alternatives. But I want to lay out my argument because this podcast is not just about do what I say and don't question it. I'm going to lay out my reasoning. And this is a tried and true list of six reasons why I don't think conquest campaigns are a good idea. And the reasons start right here. Number one is that if you bid on a keyword that is not you, Right. Let's say you're selling custom handmade writing pens and all your keywords are, you know, custom, you know, custom writing pens, custom fountain pens, you know, all wood writing pen, something like that.

13:34And then suddenly, you create a campaign that has the word JoePin. That's the name of a competitor. One word, JoePin. Google is not going to recognize the validity of that keyword.

13:58Chris Schaeffer: it's not going to recognize that it's a valid keyword that is going to have a high ctr or a you're not going to have a good quality score for your landing page your landing page relevance is going to be very low and these these factors lay into one thing that will absolutely devastate your process is that you'll suffer from poor quality scores. If you bid on your competitors, your typical quality score of, you know, five, six, seven quality score, seven out of 10, six out of 10, five out of 10, that's pretty typical. You're going to be writing these competitor terms at one to three. So your quality score will be one, two, or three.

14:48It, it won't be higher than that. There's not really any way. And the only way you'd possibly get it higher is to break the first rule that I talked about. Put your competitor's term on your landing page. Put your competitor's term in your ad copy in order to make it relevant. I mean, you are treading on thin ice here, right? Remember the retaliation argument. If you put it in your ad copy, if you put it in your landing page, I mean, this is a very personal attack. And this is not a good way to try and save a few bucks and get your quality scores up because you could bring the wrath of a very angry competitor who has both legal and potentially budget that can punish you at a high degree.

15:35So these poor quality scores are going to lead to higher cost per click. So every click is going to be more expensive. And I want to continue on that string because it's important

15:50Chris Schaeffer: that you understand. Here's number two. That was number one. This is number two. Competitors are paying a fraction of your cost per click. All right. So I just told you that your keywords will be very, very poorly ranked. One to three will be your ad score. And your competitors will have a eight, nine, 10 quality score. So they might be paying$3 a click. You are likely paying three to four times that$9,$12,$15 and up. Okay. And I'm going to tell you one thing you think, well, Chris, you're a manual bid guy. Why can't I just bid lower? Well, that is an important argument that I want to address as number three.

16:37So you say, well, I'll just bid low,

16:40Chris Schaeffer: and I'll just kind of show up, and all my clicks will be cheap. I'll just bid$4, and I'll show up every now and then. Well, because your quality scores are low, and because you're bidding at a very low CPC. Maybe you have a target CPA set on it and it's a very restrictive target CPA and it's forcing the bids at a very low bid. Or maybe you're using maximized clicks and you put a maximum click CPC of$4 in order to pull the threshold down. Well, anyone who runs a Google ad search campaign will know this. When your ads show below organic, you basically have a 0 % click-through rate. No one sees your ad.

17:27You'll get hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of impressions that have zero clicks. Just impressions. No one's seen it. Okay, so you cannot achieve this conquest approach and bid cheaply.

17:51Chris Schaeffer: You have your quality scores pushing against you and you have below organic basically making your ad invisible to most people. So don't think that you can just kind of squeeze in with low CPCs and that's not a conquest campaign. That's not what this is supposed to be about. You're supposed to be presenting a better alternative. Most often the presentation is that you're showing possibly above a competitor or you're showing right below that competitor, this is not attained at a low cost per click. Whether you're running manual bids, automated bids, maximized clicks, any of these strategies, it doesn't matter.

18:35Chris Schaeffer: You're not going to get away with cheap clicks and achieve a conquest campaign. So what is my number? That was my number three. Here's number four. and this is something I I beg many of you to be honest you're probably limited by budget why spend it here so I've made this entire pitch and I'm not done yet I've got another two points that I want to share but I've made this whole pitch why spend it on conquesting why not spend it in a direct push to try and get new traffic, traffic that has not been decided upon already. And let me tell you why I think the traffic that you go after for a wooden pin, a wooden styly pin or something like that, why that traffic is better than your competitor's traffic that they're getting.

19:42And that's point number five for you. So, port number five and port number four are basically, they are very dependent.

19:50Chris Schaeffer: If you're limited by budget, why spend it on people that are proven to often be looking for a login, customer support? They're already an existing user. They've already purchased at one point. These are probably dedicated customers of your competitor. it's it's hard enough to find a quality product or service nowadays how likely are you to just on a whim decide on someone else i mean once i find something i like i am not interested in changing just because someone else raises their hand and shouts and makes a bunch of noise i don't care and i don't think that your customers or your your potential customers are going to make that leap either.

20:40So when these people are just navigating Google, when they're searching Google for your competitor, they're likely just looking to log into the site or look up their phone number or speak with customer service or see a picture of the product that they ordered or, you know, show someone else because they say, hey, I ordered these new shoes. Let me show you. They do a search for your competitor. Your ad pops up. They click on it was like oh this isn't what wait a second let me go back they just spent 15 bucks on your click and they they are they are not interested in your shoes so conversion rates are extremely low

21:22Chris Schaeffer: right so my my last desperate attempt to make you avoid conquest campaigns is that in the end, I've run enough of these, despite my argument, to my clients that ask me to and want to try it and say, I understand, Chris, but will you please try it? Okay, I will. So, I mean, it's their money. They want to try it. So I build it out, and here's what it looks like. Here's what a post-optimized conquest campaign looks like compared to a brand-new conquest campaign. and an optimized conquest campaign looks the same as a brand new conquest campaign okay the reason is it's the same traffic it's just the words competitor abc it's just the same words over and over again it is near impossible to optimize a competitor campaign because the traffic is monotonously boring just over and over again it's the same thing it's just the competitor name the competitor name the competitor name and then maybe you get a conversion but how do you optimize on something like that how can you take the learnings of just the competitor name 400 times and you get one conversion and say, oh, I can, okay, let's try and optimize based on this one conversion, this 0.01%.

23:00How do you do that?

23:04Chris Schaeffer: How do you make a decision about, well, this guy searched competitor ABC and this guy searched competitor ABC. Let's optimize for when they search competitor ABC. It's extremely difficult. So an optimized competitor conquest campaign is extremely difficult. It basically doesn't exist. There's no such thing as a real optimized campaign. And that's why I often refer to these campaigns as kamikaze or vanity campaigns. They're not conquesting anything. The word conquest implies that you're going to win. Instead, it's more of a pride or a self-sacrifice. You're going to dive bomb into their brand searches in hopes that it's going to shrink their budget.

23:57I'll tell you what, your$12 shrinks a lot faster than their$3 does. You're not making that big of a dent. That's going to take a lot of kamikazes to make a dent in that one. And very often the vanity campaign is absolutely destructive because the CEO loves to be able to do a search and show, hey, look at this, shows his investors, look, when they search for this big competitor, look whose name shows up. That's costing them$25 a click for that vanity decision that this higher up has decided. It's a very poor use of funds. So I want to tell you here now what I suggest instead of doing that. I'm going to do that here at the very end and remind you to please check out Optio.

24:46Optio.com slash PSP.

24:49Chris Schaeffer: That's O-P-T-E-O.com slash PSP to try the 28-day free trial. The link is in the description of this podcast. So here it is. If you heard the tone of my voice, you may not be surprised. I told you what you can do with your conquest campaigns. And because I would prefer for this podcast to stay family-friendly rated, I'm just going to say what you can do with your conquest campaigns is turn them off. That's a friendly way to say it. Don't do it. In fact, I'm going to be pretty aggressive and go so far to say don't do it at all. Don't even allow competitor searches in your standard campaigns to show up.

25:47If you're bidding on a specific product service and you see competitor searches come in, block those competitor names. there might be a time and a place for you to try something like that but it should i don't think

26:04Chris Schaeffer: competitors belong in any campaign unless it is a campaign designed for that purpose so block it everywhere if if you're selling garage door repair service and there's a hundred other garage door repair services and your search terms are filled with those other company names, stop those company names from showing up. Add negative keywords. Block those. I think it is mostly a waste to show on competitors in any form, especially when you don't even mean to, especially whenever you're not specifically targeting it. So instead, focus on unclaimed leads. If you put your money towards people who have not yet made a decision about who they're going to hire, what they're going to buy, what they're looking for, who they're going to get an estimate from, I think that is a better investment in someone else who is likely already invested with another company, already made the decision to hire a different company, already made the decision to buy those shoes.

27:12There's not really any need for you to push on a person who's not going to change their mind. So focus on those unclaimed, unconquested leads. If we must use the word conquest, perhaps that's a better way to do it. And if you have stuck around to the very end, I'm going to give you, you know, you say, well, Chris, I'm going to do it. Well, I'm going to give you a quick suggestion for those of you that are hard-headed and absolutely want to do it. And you think, well, I agree with you, Chris. I still want to do it. I have the budget. I understand the consequences. And yet I want to do it. I'm going to give you my suggestion of what you should consider instead of a traditional conquest campaign.

28:06do not ever target the brand or the trademark directly. Instead, look for additional terms that you can attribute to indecision for that search. So in other words, if it's competitor ABC,

28:26Chris Schaeffer: the searches you should be focusing on are competitor ABC price, competitor ABC cost or competitor ABC discount, competitor ABC alternatives, competitor ABC reviews. Those imply a person who has not yet made a decision, not the word phone number, right? You don't want to go after competitor ABC phone number. This is very much going to fall to the customer support or someone who's already purchased or signed up for the service. So instead, go after some kind of pre-purchase indicator in the search itself, whatever that may be. That is probably a better investment. It's going to be expensive. It's likely going to be a much smaller amount of spend, but that's because the volume of search is going to be much, much lower.

29:22You're going to be catching the fringes of these searches, which is, I think, much more appropriate, going to be much more affordable for you and a much smarter way to use your budget. So if you came to this podcast saying,

29:35Chris Schaeffer: let's build a conquest campaign, and you heard my whole argument and you still want to do it, at least consider doing it this last way. use some kind of indicator to focus on the fringes of these searches, not the bullseye. Don't go after the bullseye. Go after the fringes of those still considering your competitor. All right, and with that, my name is Chris Schaefer. And if you would like to speak with me and show me your incredibly successful competitor campaign, I will dedicate an entire episode to talking about where I was wrong. If you disagree with me, send me an email, and I'd be happy to discuss where I'm wrong.

30:27Chris Schaeffer: I'm not a big fan of interviews, so I'm not necessarily opening the podcast up to interviews, but I'm welcoming the input, the feedback from others. So if you want to reach out to me, paidsearchpodcast at gmail.com. if you would like to hire me to work on your campaigns or provide coaching for your company or uh management for your google ads you can find me chrisshafer.com otherwise i'll be here next monday i'll see you then