Competitors Bidding on Your Brand Name: Why It Happens & How to Fight Back

Spotted a competitor running ads on your brand name? Here's exactly why it happens and how to shut it down. 

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy Young breaks down how competitor brand bidding works, from accidental PMax spillover to deliberately crafted conquesting ads. 

Learn how to use auction insights, bid strategy, and sharp ad copy to outgun competitors and make their clicks painfully expensive, or when to go nuclear and take the fight to their brand terms instead. Whether you're dealing with a friendly rival or a cut-throat competitor, this episode gives you the full playbook to protect your brand and fight back smart.

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

Imagine this. One day you're looking for your brand and suddenly you see your competitor's ad above yours. Very often, maybe with very specific, snidey remarks to you or even worse with your own brand. name in their ad and you are thinking sugar they are robbing clicks from me. How you prevent that from happening and what you do against that more in this episode. Welcome back to Google Ads Unleash guys. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday. It is a wonderful bank holiday weekend in Britain. Nonetheless, I'm on here rambling about Google Ads yet again in another episode. telling you um what to do when certain things happen and giving you best practices. And this week you I want to tell you a little bit about um uh competitor ads. Okay. So very often I get this from clients where they send me screenshots of competitors bidding on their brand name and asking me to do something about it. So today I will share uh how that can happen and why it happens in the first place. So first of all, how can this even happen in the first place? So both on shopping and on search, it can be completely accidental, right? So there is something that there is an element in there that you may see ads from competitors without without them actually knowing that they are bidding on your branded searches. Because the reality is I think I've seen a report a couple of months ago about about this some certain number of brand uh or certain number of searches on Google are actually branded something like 20% or something like that. So of course Google has monetized that kind of search volume as much as possible and it does that with uh Pax uh very often, right? So um what happens is a competitor launches a Pmax, Google identifies your brand name as relevant for said competitor and actually shows shopping and search ads for those uh for your own branded search. So that is a common thing that happens all the time and competitors are actually bidding on you without even realizing it. Okay. So it could be completely accidental and very often it does actually then help to just reach out if you have any sort of course if relationship with them. Of course if they are worst enemy then I wouldn't recommend doing so. But very often a gentleman's agreement of just simply not bidding on each other can be reached. Okay, so this is something I highly recommend sometimes because I know people who are on pretty good terms with their competitors even because I think you know your competitor is your rival, not your enemy. So very often um it just makes sense to have a respectful conversation with them and say listen we're both propheteer if uh uh we're both prophets sorry if If we just don't do this a bit like the prisoners dilemma situation, look it up. Prisoners dilemma. Very interesting philosophical experiment, thought experiment. Um, and yeah, better both are better off then. Okay, so this is something that can happen. But sometimes and very often actually, it's malicious. Okay, and you see that usually by how the ad copy is tailored to especially the brand search, right? Uh, so brand shopping you can't see, but with brand footage. You can very much see um for instance, you see this very often, they will say stuff like try us instead or X is better or or something like that and then you have to kind of do something about it. Why do people do it? Because branded search volume exists, right? So, um very often brands uh uh are associated with a certain thing, right? What do I mean by that? For instance, not many people will search for email marketing software, but many people will search for Mailchimp, right? So, you of course associated brand with some form of intent and want a bit of a pie on that. Um, but um very often people think that this is like a very cool strategy in order to uh gain maybe uh and and uh gain something more. Although actually those cheap those clicks are not cheap. Okay. So, if you bid on your different comp competitor's uh brand name or if a competitor bids on your brand name, the cost per clicks are usually actually quite punitive for the reason that the quality score is quite poor. Okay? But um so why people do it as well is they actually think that they are hurting you with that. Okay? And you just need to fight back and that's the easiest way of doing that. Okay? So I've already mentioned that you can just contact the competitor directly if you have a good relationship with them and especially in some small niches there might be uh where people know each other better. This this works or you have this mutual interest of uh not wanting to bid on each other's name and that can really work. But something that works very often is to just report them uh to Google directly as a trademark complaint. Now this only works if they actually use your brand name in their ads which I have seen before. I've even accidentally done it myself before and gotten in trouble for it through this is a very long story for another day. Um, but yeah, this is clearly not allowed. You're not allowed to use a competitor's brand name in your ad. Um, and they're not allowed either. So, if you catch them with that, you can actually uh send them a hefty fine from your lawyer and also a cease and desist order. Okay, so that is something that I would do. And And I would really go the nuclear option when this happens because um it's quite cheeky to do so and they mustn't do that whatsoever. Okay. Uh and then of course you can just quite simply um you know uh maybe or or you approach your competitor one of the two. Just be aware though that simply them bidding on you is not illegal. You can absolutely do that. There's nothing that says on Google that you're not allowed to use competition keywords. You're just not allowed. to use um the brand name in the ads. Okay, totally two different things. Uh the second thing that you can do is just to defend your brand, right? So run your own brand campaign. I've got plenty of episodes of how you structure it properly, when to run it, when not to run it. This is one of the sort of classic cases where you should be running a brand campaign, right? If you see uh a compet a competitor is bidding on your brand name, then you should fight back by just bidding uh on yours as well, reactivating that brand search and of course set the bids accordingly that you outgun your competitor. It makes them pay ridiculously more and also your own CPCs are super super cheap to run and then you can quite easily fight back. Uh you should then regularly of course uh raise your your bids or set your bids accordingly that you appear above them. and regularly uh monitor your auction insights. Um don't just go off anecdotal sort of evidence but actually have a look then into the brand search what kind of data it reports and as a result that is what you then should be uh trying to follow. Right? So if your impression share increases if their position above rate decreases that is where you know you're on the right path. Okay. Something that you can do as well uh which I do like to do is to then use ad copy as the differentiator and do that uh and and basically just respond to them. So if they try uh let's say for instance a first move in an industry and they tried to say something like try x y and zed instead you can like say stuff like for instance stick with the original or the original just make sure that you have a better guarantee that you have um maybe better better offer or and so on and so on just to ensure that uh your ad copy is just more compelling and that their efforts are wasted. You can even like allude to the fact that you know that they're bidding on you in order to um uh sort of try and yeah uh get them out of there. Okay. And get at them. Then lastly, the last thing that you can do as well is uh to um just move into a counterattack. So if they don't stop up if you don't have a good relationship with them if you don't etc etc etc all the stuff that I've mentioned and they just keep doing it I would go the onto the nuclear option and bid make a competition campaign and bid on them in return as well to um yeah uh to to basically just fight back because um if they annoy you I would annoy be annoying back um the issue is you're going to be running into the the exactly exact same issues. You're going to spend a ton on that. It's not going to be really uh I should say uh as as as as good as you might think it works. Uh it would work, but I would then just refer to my episode about competition campaigns and how to structure them because you can do for instance specific landing pages or etc. Or you can maybe even start bidding on your competitor with advertorials for instance, right? So you can do that sort of stuff and that works pretty good. Okay. So, in some um it could be an accident, right? So, um just if you have a good thread with them, approach them, say, "Listen, uh this may not be uh as you want. Let's do a deal. We just don't bid each other on each other's brand names." If you don't have uh a good relationship with them, then screw them. Uh defend your own brand. Mention it in the ad copy. Fight back with uh clever strategies as I've just mentioned. and monitor your auction insights in order to set budgets and bids accordingly. Um, something that you may want to do is strengthen the organic presence as well, right? So, to just build that out. Uh, but that is something nonPBC related. So, I wouldn't know how to do that. It's just something that is of course part of your branded presence. And if they are stupid enough to use your own uh brand name in their ads, take a screenshot, send it to your lawyer, send it to Google, and let them do the work. Uh, but if If you want to let us do the work, man, we've got uh slots opening up in the agency, right? So, just send us a message. I know there's loads of listeners out there because a listener has recently actually started working with us and we've uncovered in just one hour in our first session of consultancy, some absolutely crazy stuff. So, duplicate conversion tracking, obvious errors in the merchant center, which they fixed instantly and saved themselves hundreds if not thousands and thousands of pounds per month. Um, so it's worth getting in touch. Get in touch Jeremy on Google Ads, Jeremyanddigital.arketing um on on LinkedIn. You'll find me there. Uh, get in touch on the website younganddigital.marketing and just book a onetoone with me and you will see me uh in my lovely little office in the flesh talking to you about Google. If this sounds great, crack on. In that note, thank you very much for listening. As always, please subscribe if you find this uh helpful information and give this all a like as well. This has been Jeremy Young, your personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.