How to Stop Competitors from Bidding on Your Brand Terms
Losing your brand to some other company On the internet has its frustrating measures. But this isn’t entirely a new thing. It’s just basically small brands, using your name to sell more products. Sometimes, it could be from big brands as well because let’s face it; you never have enough traffic. For a reason best known to Google, this act isn’t condemned by them. In fact, they permit it. Be it knowingly or unknowingly but a large performance platform like Google actually let’s this happen.
Well, there’s good news as you can do to make competitors find your brand less worthy and take down those ads.
1. Should you take actions or not?
Before taking any drastic measures, be sure to know if it’s worth taking actions over. You can start by the biggest search engine. Google. And of course, it’s partner websites. Some of these websites could be small or big.
You can go through these websites, searching for your brand and checking competitors that pop up for your Brand.
You can also check the rankings and if the competitors bidding on your brand name actually affects your rank. Hopefully, it doesn’t, but if it does, write it down. And if you find out it takes a plunge, Follow action number 2.
2. Ask nicely
It might be fun and not what you were expecting but yes, do ask nicely. This would let your competitors know you want them to stop has to be one of the kindest gestures you can use as we all know, communication can avoid a lot of misunderstanding. Starting a full-scale war on them without an actual warning wouldn’t exactly be the best idea.
But you should know it has more chances of not working. Come on; these guys are making lots of waves using your brand name and probably wouldn’t stop just because you asked politely. But you want them to know you do not appreciate what they are doing and want to them call quits.
First, you would like to send a polite email, letting them aware of your intentions and telling them of your brand name. If you get no feedback, sending another polite email would do no harm as it shows you want to resolve this without conflict but this time, with a sterner warning.
If you still get no feedback, then it’s time to have some fun while at it by following step 3.
3. Go high On your brand to shake them off:
You’re probably not bidding on your own brand name giving competitors the opportunity to. The less expensive your keyword is, the more likely competitors are to take it up and make it theirs.
So the first thing you want to do is to start bidding on your brand name. You might wonder why you need to do this as you’re already ranking high but your competitors don’t see it that way, and as expensive you might think it is, how Would you feel if their paid ads are just above your organic listing? Not so good, I’m sure.
You want to dominate the top of the page when your brand is sorted after. The very top spot and the good news is, it doesn’t have to be that expensive. If you don’t have a high Cost-per-click, then bidding is relatively low, but if your competitors are ranking high still, you’d want to raise your bid by a lot.
By doing this, you’re making it difficult and more expensive for your competitors to keep up.
4. You might want to go sneaky on them
Now using someone’s trademark as a keyword sits well with google but when it’s used as an ad copy, Then it violates Google’s rules, and they just won’t take that.
How about you go check your competitor’s site for these violations? Call it sneaky all whatnot; the internet doesn’t play fair.
So reviewing your competitors’ site in all search engines, networks, and websites, looking for any Ad violation of any sort and report them straight to Google could be your best chance of taking back your spot at this rate.
5. You might want to increase the Ad rank about now.
The way your brand appears on your Search Engine Results Pages is determined by your AdRank. It determines how high or low it is, as trust me, you want it as high as possible.
There are three ways Google calculates your AdRank. By using your bid amount, your landing page experience and also your expected click-through rate which Google calculates with an algorithm.
You should make your Click-through rate (CTR) appealing enough for users to want to click on it.
You should make your landing page have exactly what a user is looking for. Make sure the pictures and write-ups are relevant, and headlines provide what they claim. It should also be easy to load quickly and navigate properly to please the users.
6. Occupy your search engine result page and shake them off
Ad extensions to your brand can wave off competitors from bidding on your brand name. This is also a great way to increase your CTR. You might also want to Know that quality store influences the chances of your ad extensions would show.
Ad extensions are generally added pieces of information to your ad which might consist of numbers to call, links to your site and even customer reviews. not only do they shake off your competition, you can achieve more sales by this.
It takes up quite a lot of space with your information on it, and most people don’t scroll too much to the end or even check the next page of search engines. This can throw competitors off as they wouldn’t be getting as much attention as they wanted.
Ad extensions come in two ways. The Manuel extensions which are set up by you and the automatic extensions which are set up by Google.
You may be wondering, is bidding on competitor brand ever a good idea?
It’s basically on the fence with this one because a lot of companies have benefitted a lot from bidding on competing brands. You might have heard the best way to beat your competitors is to sell yourself as them till you gain grounds and this isn’t entirely false, and it’s also not a terrible idea.
So many brands target competitor keywords such as Samsung’s s6 and iPhone 6s mix up. It’s usually creative, and because even big brands do it, no one bats an eye. At the end of the day, the internet is a competitive force.
Conclusion :
Being outsmarted by another person hurts all the more when it’s your business. As long as Google permits it, it’ll always exist, so you have to look for other ways to go about this problem without involving Google.
You have to remember to survey the problem and how much damage it’s causing your brand. Know if taking actions would be worth it after all. Try sending email to your competitors to get good grounds and send across your intentions. Who knows, they just might take it down. But In cases where they don’t, follow these steps and get your brand name back.