Google Ads is a saturated marketplace – 64.6% of users click on ads, with only the remaining 35.4% clicking on Organic results only. Fortunately, there are ways to get ahead of competitors – Tanesha Stafford gives us 5 tips to take a bigger chunk of the market share.
SKAGs
For those not familiar, SKAGs, or Single Keyword Ad Groups, are a popular method to ensure that our ads are as relevant to the users query as possible – target one keyword, and write the most relevant ad copy and send the user to the most relevant page possible.
By doing this, advertisers are able to give the user exactly what they’re searching for – users are selfish, and we demand to be shown what we need to be shown, rather than trawling through sites to find relevant content.
Eg. let’s take a search for strapless dresses. Below are 2 ads shown for the search, one targeting dresses as a keyword, and one using the aforementioned SKAG structure.
The second ad takes us to a landing page featuring all dresses, the first to Strapless Dresses, relevant to the search. It’s obvious which campaign is using SKAGs, and we’d expect to see higher conversion rates from this too.
Location
80% of users use mobiles inside stores to find reviews, competitor prices etc. As PPCers, we can use this to our advantage. By looking at competitor locations eg. by going through their site and finding depot/store/branch locations, we can then explicitly target these in our own campaigns.
Using these to our advantage, we can show ads for users searching within one of these locations, offering users a better deal with our own product.
Look at locations from a competitors website eg. dealerships, and use that as radius targeting for our advertising. We can show them a better deal.
Audiences
I’m sure we’re all familiar with using Retargeting audiences in our Search and Display campaigns. However, there are options that can help leverage ads that use user interests when they haven’t visited your site too. In-market audiences allow us to target pre-defined categories as put together by Google. As well as this, if in-market audiences don’t provide enough coverage for users interested in competitors, we can utilise Custom Intent audiences, entering our own keywords and competitor URLs for Google to define ad placements by.
We can now target our ads to users interested in these competitors, providing an opportunity to steal some of the market share. eg. Car Brand audiences – by targeting relevant car dealerships eg. Vauxhall, we will be eligible to show our ad to customers still in their consideration buying phase.
“Naughty keywords”
Not that kind. By being a bit cheeky with our keyword targeting, we can help show our ads to users unhappy with a product, looking for a deal on a brands product and so on. Examples of this include “cancel it” keywords – users looking to cancel subscriptions, memberships etc. are obviously unhappy with whatever service is being provided, creating an opportunity for you to present your service as the better alternative.
Another example of this is users looking for deals, discount codes or money off a brands product, again providing space to promote your own brand’s deals.
Be a sneak
As well as using various tools such as SEMrush to see what competitors are bidding on, we can also work out competitor’s ad schedules. In the likely event of not having an unlimited budget, we can use this information to our advantage. Find times when their ad isn’t appearing, or when a competitor’s budget usually runs out by, and build campaigns for this. This way, it’s possible to dominate the market space even with an under budget campaign.
And tha’s about it, 5 tips to steal ad space from your competitors, simple!
