Stop Copying Your Competitors: Reverse Benchmarking in Google Ads

Stop copying competitors in Google Ads—win by standing out. 

In this episode of Google Ads Unleashed, host Jeremy breaks down “reverse benchmarking,” inspired by Rory Sutherland, and explains why differentiation beats imitation in competitive auctions. 

Learn how messaging, positioning, pricing strategy, and product-market fit impact Google Ads performance more than hacks or automation ever will.

Rory Sutherland clip 1: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MGrbru05VzE
Rory Sutherland clip 2: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GuhxCcPb-_k

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Stop doing what your competitors are doing. This is what makes you stand out. I've recently come across a fabulous fabulous little video on my little feed from a very famous British um ads guru, I'd say ads adsman called Rory Sutherland. And he talks about a concept that e calls reverse benchmarking on there. Why this is really important for Google ads, I will tell you in this episode. Hello everyone and welcome back to Google Ads Unleash guys. Hope everyone is doing fine and fabulous this Monday. Today is going to be bit more of an ad philosophy episode. Why is that important? I talk a lot about sort of technical things. I talk a lot about um sort of new strategies. hacks, different things that you can do in the Google Ads platform, updates maybe of the ad platform. But if I boil everything down, what we're doing is Google is just another tool to do marketing, right? And you can do marketing many ways. You could go outside and put yourself on a soap box and market your product, right? That's a form of marketing. Different tools have different outcomes and have different ways of um generating customers and they're just a different tool to reach your ideal client. And all you do with Google Ads or with Meta, whatever you use, is amplify your existing messaging. Okay? You want to you've got a product, you've got a mission, you've got a brand, you have a certain messaging that you want to get out to people. and Google is a tool to do so. So, if you use Google Ads and your messaging is poor, it doesn't matter which tool you use, your message is not going to work. And I've recently come across an unbelievably inspiring little piece when I was just m mindlessly scrolling through my Instagram from Rory Sutherland. He's quite famous in the UK. He's like uh and worldwide, I suppose. He's a very famous uh sort of thinker uh think tank leader um admin and he come up with a concept called reverse benchmarking. So in a first for this podcast I'm actually going to play two clips that come to mind and I'm going to tell you why this is relevant to Google ads than more than it has ever been because I'm a firm believer you need to be a good marketer and understand how messaging works beyond the ad platform. It's self in order to achieve great results. Listen to this.

This is what's so funny. There's an idea I'm playing with in marketing generally and in innovation which I call reverse benchmark. So the idea is what most companies do is they benchmark themselves against their competition. The great writer on this is a guy called Roger L. Martin who's my own personal Canadian my own personal business guru and he wrote a piece called Benchmarking is for losers that all you do is you diminish your margins by making yourself in direct competition with your other competitors. So you don't benefit your profits or your shareholders and also you don't benefit your customers and the reason you don't benefit your customers is because they're then deprived of choice and differentiation and you don't benefit the overall category because the category loses value because it's more homogeneous.

Wow. So he talks about this concept he calls reverse benchm marking. Essentially, what this is is he is a firm believer that by diversifying your offer and your messaging and making yourself stand out against competition is how you actually win and gain value in the competitive landscape. So, this is super relevant for us as Google Ads advertisers because whilst there is of course a lot of competition for any brand on any platform including Meta For pull marketing, direct competition is one of the core and most difficult things to navigate and one of the most powerful ways how you can actually overcome your um competition and how you can actually stand out in the auction. Because let's face it, in the end, Google Ads is a comparison platform. It's a price comparison platform. That's why pricing is such a such a difficult or such a not difficult sorry such an important ranking factor right if you have a cheaper price a better price than competitors often times you win the auction that's why for instance automatic discounts work so well one of Google's latest features of the last year um if you are able to uh dynamically reduce the price um then of course you win more auctions that's why when you have a sale price on and push products there that's why those campaigns tend to do Well, but there's more than just price, right? When people search for products on Google, they are in research mode. And when you research, you compare. And nowadays, more than ever, people have the luxury of taking their sweet time to uh research a product before they pull the trigger. And I think in nowadays in the digital landscape, this is more pronounced than ever, right? People have a lot of sort of I think the sort of buying journey is more complex than ever and people take into account so many touch points before they pull the trigger on your site. And what a lot of our clients as well obsess about and what they get wrong is what their competition is doing. They of course it's important to know what your competition is doing, but they try to copy them all the time. They're trying to copy their ad concepts. on meta ads. They're trying to copy their CTAs. They're trying to copy what they do in their basket right on the basket page. They're trying to copy their discount system or their offer system. And the thing is, I can tell you firsthand that not only does not always their stuff work, that's the first thing, right? You always focus on what the competition is doing and assuming that it is working, but that is not how you stand out. That's not how you differentiate yourself. Okay? So, you find a lot more value in trying to find out what you can do differently and better in order to win the customer over. Rory provides another fantastic little example of a restaurant um that he sort of um uh that that took this how should I say experience to a uh or this this reverse benchmark into another level. 11 Madison Park in New York is a very fancy fancy place. And listen to what they did and listen to this what how they done it.

11 Madison Park number 50 restaurant in the world. San Pedigo Awards wants to get to number one. He takes his whole team out to the number one restaurant in the world and everybody starts making lists of what they do really well. So they will go not into any of that. Goes they're already doing it. So what's the point? What didn't they do well? But they come up with two things. Okay, the coffee was nothing special. And so the beer was disappointing. Coffee was disappointing. See, goes back to his own restaurant said, "Right, you guy who's a coffee nut. You're now the coffee smelling. And your job is to make this the best coffee experience in any restaurant in the U." So, you know, you actually go like, "Coffee, please. Do you have any roast preference?" You know, and the other guy is the beer smellier. And so, not many people in a Mishan three star restaurant for beer. But they're just expecting nothing. They expect, "Yeah, we got this on draft and we got this in a c." And instead, they get this guy coming over with suggested food pairings. Now, I think that's reverse benchmarking.

Here we go again. So, he tells the story of 11 11 Madison Park, fantastic uh high-scale restaurant in in New York, was number 50 in the world. They wanted to get to number one in the world. What did they do? They went to the best restaurant that they could find. Instead of copying what they did well, they improved what they didn't do well and doubled down on that. Okay. Okay, so there's a lesson in that and it transpires any setting that you could ever pull in a Google Ads account. Okay? And it outguns everything you could ever do as a marketer on the ad platform. And I know that because I would probably without sort of blowing my own trumpet too much, I am probably one of the top 50 PPCs in the world. Okay? And even I can't and save certain things from certain death. And I want to finish this off with a with an anecdote. So we used to um look after a company here in Britain. They sold pagas. Pagas are like this thing that you put on your house um in in your uh yard. Well, in your back garden or in in your um in your garden and you can sit in it in summer and it provides shade and it's cool. And in winter uh you could turn it even with a bit of a glass door into like an extra room like an like an extension if you want like um yeah and anyway they were the number one pagola company in Britain as well and the ad setup was brilliant we were tracking the tracking was fantastic over server side we had offline conversion tracking as well for the sales team um we had first party data in the ad account the feed was optimized everything We've tried all campaigns, lots of settings, lots of learnings, and the account was running like clockwork, and then suddenly overnight, this was September 24, I believe, the ad account crashed overnight. Nothing worked anymore. Out of nowhere, this um new company came on the market and was running Google ads. And with the advent of these guys, our ads stopped working. overnight. Okay. So what had happened the guys that we were looking after they had um the most expensive pagas and that was good because they were you know position themselves as the luxury provider in this space had more margin as a result to be able to acquire new customers more profitably. Right? So that was great. Um but what they didn't sort of take into account was a couple of things. First of all, the personalization options were quite poor. Okay, that was the first thing. And the second thing is that they um didn't really display the value for money that you would get with this with this um um uh with this product. And the third thing that didn't wasn't so great, they only had like two or three sort of size options that weren't maybe as fitting for every area in uh for for as many houses, right? So, this new company that came in, not only were they like a third cheaper on every, which always helps, the site was pretty decent, similar, but their big USP, which they doubled down on, was pretty simple. Um, and it was they offered personalization options, which made it feel super special and and specific to your house. They had very specific size in options that you could choose without an extra cost and the like I said they were just uh a little bit cheaper right and had more personal other personalization options as well and that was it basically we realized that people wanted to have more choice in what they can pull off in or or sort of buy in this pagola product and this new competitor came online overnight absolutely destroyed us. And I'm sure they didn't have the fancy the fancier Google ad setup than us. I'm sure they didn't have a guy of the caliber of our team. Um they just analyzed the market, understood what was missing and made a product that in direct comparison was simply a better product and provided a better customer experience. And I think there's a lesson in that because if you manage to unlock that for your client, If you're looking at competitors now and are managing to unlock that for yourself and you can even use AI for this sort of s*** nowadays. That is how you win. And you don't even need the fanciest tricks, the fanciest hacks. This is how you win. Unfortunately, we lost this client in the end because what had happened is that they wanted to double down on their messaging, ignored our advice. Um, obviously there were certain path dependencies. You know, they had tons of stock. Um the design couldn't just be changed on a short term. They couldn't like just sort of change the entire site in order to um pivot. So that that was just that and it just didn't work out anymore. But that's just how things go sometimes. And you can be the best marketer in the world. If someone has a good idea, good ideas win. And if that was interesting and helpful, Maybe you want to have a chat with us. Maybe you're looking at your own site and thinking, what is that sort of edge that I need in order to get my ads to work and for that you can speak with us. You just have to get in touch, Jeremy. Jeremy Young and Google Ads on LinkedIn. You can find me there. Um, you can also go on to the website young anddigital.marketing and just book a onetoone with me. And this has been another episode of Google Ads and Niche Guys with personal Google Ads expert Jazza here. I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.