Beating Google Adwords competition by using your competitor’s brand name.
In terms of traffic management I primarily focus on organic traffic as it is the type of traffic that is really targeted and that comes to a site to really use the content that’s generated. The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius has always been proud of its 3% bounce rate over 2 years. Now, Google Adwords and PPC traffic is a whole different thing. Getting your fingers in such a cogwheel implies that you’ve tried and tested the techniques on small or medium sized campaigns before entering the big picture. My biggest picture has been a 1 year campaign at 3000€ per month for a client. I will not be giving a lecture on how to use Google Adwords and make the best use of it. There are better people than me when it comes to explaining this subject, I can just invite you to meet them over at PPC Hero.
Beating the Google Adwords competition.
So what is this beating the Google Adwords Competition about? When you go on a Google Adwords crusade, you usually have competitors on the same line, bidding higher than you to reach the top positions in the sponsored links to drive traffic to their site. Now, the big problem is: where do you hit the hardest to get the Google Adwords treasure? The answer is brand name! As weird as this might seem I’m going to give away one of Google’s most mysterious tricks to beat Google Adwords competition with the use of brand names. I stumbled on this by chance and readily understood the implications. This one is not a secret but it is not talked about too much.
Use your competitor’s brand name.
Provided you’re not going to fight Ebay, Amazon or Coca-Cola, you can use your competitors’ brand name to divert their traffic to your site. Here’s how this goes, you can use your competitors’ trademarked terms as keywords in Google Adwords. This depends on whether they have set a record at Google’s to have the keywords reserved or not. Many companies, maybe even your’s, don’t know that there’s this little loophole in Google Adwords and have not done the necessary to shut down the traffic diversion. This is all explained in this discussion I found in the Google Adwords archive. Many big companies seem to have arrangements with Google Adwords, otherwise anybody can bid on a trademark as a keyword. This smells fishy, especially if you’ve registered your trademark, but it actually is true.
Real life experiment.
I wouldn’t be giving out this trick to beat Google Adwords competition without being 100% sure that this can be done, would I? I did a test on Google. One big trademark would be the famous Kawasaki motorcycles. I just typed the trademark name in Google and, hey presto, Google Adwords showed me what their competitors (or sellers) were doing with the keyword.
Aaaaannnnnd, action!
Here you go then. You now have something to beat Google Adwords competition in one go by directly tackling the competitors’ brand names. This also means that you must not be afraid to get in that mine field either. I’m just trying to imagine, say, Le matinal, L’express, Defi Media and Le Mauricien hitting on each other’s keywords on Google ***drooool***.
About the Author:
Sachin D. Brojmohun has extensive experience in terms of graphic design, CSS integration, usability and accessibility as well as in SEO. More about him and the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius here: Web Design Mauritius.
Twitter: blebon
says:
I do not think many Mauritian companies are willing to pay for online advertising. E.g. it was very difficult to get the MMM buying Facebook adverts during an electoral campaign, now imagine mean companies who still confuse between a Facebook profile and a website.
btw I never pay attention to the side links in the right sidebar of a Google search.
Bruno recently wrote:
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Twitter: web_design_mu
says:
Very true Bruno. While many are not doing it, others will find a way and understand how this works. This is the most important element here.
Concerning the right bar, many people just don’t look at it, this is why it works on pay per click, otherwise I think that it would have been called “give us all your money”
.
Twitter: kurtavish
says:
Haha. It’s a nice and working tips of course but less talked one. In fact when I just read the last sentence of this post I got that evil smile on my face lol.
I used it during the electoral campaign in mauritius by targeting defimedia, le matinal and other common mix of their own trademark keyword. Used it for only a 2 day campaign on Adword to drive the rise in search on Google.mu toward IC. And well… I managed to keep a lot of those new people by making them subscribe to IC.
Plus: The keywords for the local stuff here are cheap. I placed it at the minim 0.05.
However spending on adword must bring something in return. Just bringing traffic and letting them read and go is worthless IMO. The aim is to make new people know abt the site and try to keep them coming back. Then I think its a worthwhile investment.
Kurt Avish recently wrote:
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Twitter: blebon
says:
BTW how much are you willing to pay for advertising?
Webdesign_bureau and I have not been able to monetise our blogs yet 
You are the only one with a real monetized blog. Even if I would just break even, I would not have found it worth advertising on adwords. Would not get subscribers or regular visitors with that.
Bruno recently wrote:
Statement by Sookdeo Bissoondoyal at the constitutional conference
Twitter: web_design_mu
says:
I’ll answer in depth later but congrats: you have the 1000th comment on the Bureau
Twitter: web_design_mu
says:
@Bruno, as my last post shows, I’m more on a straight and targeted traffic curve. The type of traffic that does not really click on the ads. It’s a type of traffic I’m targeting, so I bear with it.
Twitter: cgabertrand
says:
My point of view is that before investing in some ad campaign here, one should reflect on the berserk mode the campaign would adopt within an environment where Social Media seem to have taken command.
One should first investigate, analyze groups and networks behaviors before getting the right words inside the right circles. The aim of an ad is to push to purchase or consume and fact is that on FB groups and pages one out of maybe 20 ad units are visited by a subscriber (as far as my experience can recall).
Up to date, to me, on a practical and efficient online Ad campaign, Community Management is crucial. With the responsibility to drive a group towards common objectives, it can extract valuable data that can be translated into a timely multi-frame strategy.
Personally i believe that it is more profitable to invest in Social Media and Networking than in lengthy unpredictable adword campaigns.
Twitter: web_design_mu
says:
Thanks for your comment Alain. Actually, community management and seo as well as ad campaigns strategies are all linked in a whole marketing strategy. The whole point of engaging with client interaction is to build a community around a product or a brand but what would it be if the said brand or product is invisible. Showing these is the first step to getting a community coming to a product and interacting with it.
Twitter: web_design_mu
says:
@KurtAvish : Well, spending money on a website implies getting some sort of ROI at the end of the road. As long as they come back to consume more content and getting them to click on your monetisation campaign it does hold on. Now, do you get them to really click on the worthy links?
I know that a lot of people analyse all this and calculate the ROI of investing on some paid ads.
Twitter: kurtavish
says:
You’re right. I do not really sell anything (except some aff stuff which are generally useful, such as domain names or hosting aff). The aim of the advertising was to bring the visitors on the concerned page. I am also using aweber as autoresponder to convert them and you will see that I placed free offers at strategic places during the sign up process. (The newsletter signup only appears when someone come for the first time on the homepage only…mostly to target mauritians who are discovering the blog now).
Well it is a sort of a good roi since I am able to satisfy the advertisers on the sign up process page (that is getting a revenue with it) and also getting a list of returning readers. It’s no big deal in term of profit right now since I do not sell anything, but I think the same concept can apply to a site offering a service.
Use PPC to attract, catch in the sign up form, propose your advertiser’s offer (affiliate ones which are free work best here), get both a loyal reader plus let’s say nearly 10 time what you invested to bring that one particular visitor in.
I’ll blog on the method on IcyTips soon. Just a bit stuck these days…but also happy to be finally over with University
Kurt Avish recently wrote:
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Twitter: web_design_mu
says:
Well, I’ll sure be waiting for that post. I really haven’t been that far into monetisation of the website for one major reason: time. I also do not have enough traffic to implement affiliates or sign up processes. Last time I did it, it turned out to become a huge spam bait.
Twitter: cgabertrand
says:
Totally agree, but I still sustain my main idea which says that SEO is bound to change bringing Social Media at the heart of optimization engine and architecture. You have at least half of my answer when you talk about Brand Name. With the advent of Online Community Management, we will get back to traditional advertising values, where the audience determines the fees. Up to now the Adsense and Adword thing have been really working fine but I still doubt of its efficiency when it comes to drive the socializer to purchase. By these times when FB is dashing towards the half billion mark, we should see resurgence of advertising based on the traditional model.
What do you think ?
http://minerva.minnasama.com
Twitter: web_design_mu
says:
Thanks again for participating in the discussion Alain. I have already treated the advent of social media faced to search engines (hence their marketing plan) back in January in this article: When Social Media Killed Google which at some point stepped on a preview of what Google Caffeine turned out to be. Social media is the next step but it has to be included, as I said before, in a whole marketing plan allowing community managers do their job.
This means that the model is not obsolete but it is evolving. The good health of a model can be estimated when we see how it mutates and adds new technologies or interactions in its original use. Take the Internet for instance, back in the 90s only web programmers built websites, today we’re talking about community managers in an age where my own aunt is launching her blog.
The whole picture must be taken in one go and we cannot allow ourselves are marketeers and project managers to look at things from only one standpoint, otherwise the competitor will be the one who’ll get into the breach we’ve left open.
A mutating marketing model is what we need.
Twitter: cgabertrand
says:
I more than adhere to your point of view. The marketing model is actually taking more time to adapt to the out burst of Social Media and Networking. And the new bubble is moving even very fast ahead towards we don’t still know what. My belief is that the CC and Open Source will come up with new Search Engine Ranking algorithms and that the actual Search Engines will remain only for technical indexing of the zillions of pages that are going to be generated in a very near future.
The figures are here : 1 billion on FB by next year, and a 2nd third two figure monthly progression for Twitter.
The future is definitely social.