Hi, I have inherited control over my company's Google Adwords and Analyics accounts and I am in the process of optimizing them. The person who has set these accounts up in the first place has put competitors company names and brand names in the keywords for some of our Google Adwords adverts to try and catch some extra business but becuase (i'm guessing) we dont mention our competitors in the adverts themselves or on the pages the adverts link to, they dont have a very good Average Position (usually around the 6 or 7 area). Is there any way to improve their performance without mentioning the competitors? Is this a good tactic for PPC advertising?
In my experience, this tactic almost never produces good results. If people type in a competitor's brand, they are likely sold on it already. You would only make them aware of your brand (if they didn't already). Because they are already sold on the other brand, click rates are low, five to ten times lower usually. If you don't or can't use the brand in your ad, that doesn't help either. This affects your QS and increases your costs if you want higher positions. The best thing this tactic will tell you is which brands are more popular by the number of searches on those keywords. This in itself is good information to have. You can see if your market share is increasing.
So how can i test for that? (market share bit) I've created a report just to include the 'competitor' keywords and it only gives me, as an example, 130 impressions last month. But that is obviousl not the number of searches people have made for our competitor, just the number that our ad has made it into. Can this really be considered usefull data? After all we'll have 50k+ imprssions per month for our ads. So 130 is obviously a tiny fraction.
Competitor A keywords get 200 impressions, Competitor B 150, You 150. This would tell you that you are as popular as Competitor B and you both have about 30% of the market while A has 40%. Not a precise number but gives you an idea of where you might stand. If your numbers go up the following month, it might be an indication you are doing things correctly and gaining market share. Don't you think that is useful information?