Do you want to steal away some of your competitors’ potential clients? If so, this little trick might be for you.
In the past, we used to run all of our competitor campaigns(*) on manual bidding with a CPC bid, and made sure we ranked at the top of the page.
We noticed that it was very hard to make these kinds of campaigns profitable because Quality Scores, CTRs, and Conversion Rates tend to be really low compared to the generic keywords in our accounts. This resulted in CPAs that were mostly too high.
Not anymore.
A few months ago, we started testing smart bidding on competitor campaigns, and the results have been very compelling.
Here’s the data from one of the latest experiments:
Note that the only difference between the original and the experiment is the bidding strategy. Search term analyses did not show a significant difference in the types of searches our ads showed for.
What this tells me is that Google’s target CPA bidding has learned how to discriminate between clicks from people who are open to an alternative, versus the people who are specifically looking to buy from the competitor.
Great job Google, smart bidding FTW!
(*) Note that competitor campaigns are campaigns that only contain competitor brand names as keywords.
– Nils