How to win competitor traffic with Demand Gen and win with negative intentions

Traditional competitors’ campaigns often generate expensive clicks and disappointing results. People looking for a competitor’s brand are often closer to making a purchase, making your ad more of a distraction on their path to conversion.

Bidding on your competitor’s product terms is not your only option. Demand Gen campaigns and poorly targeted keywords can help you reach an audience that is aware of your competitors more effectively and often at a lower cost.

Demand Gen: Your target audience at a fraction of the cost

Before we get into keywords with bad intentions, let’s discuss another type of campaign that can generate unknown traffic for your brand: Demand Gen.

Demand Gen relies on two key factors: targeting and creativity. Two non-negotiable parts of targeting are custom audience segments and lookalike audiences.

Custom segment targeting allows you to reach users who have searched for specific terms on Google or who have specific interests or purchase intentions. It is also one of the best ways to target users who are looking for your competitors at a lower cost than search.

Custom segments are the first targeting option available (right after the title) when creating new audiences within Demand Gen campaigns.

Choose the second option, People who have searched for any of these terms on Googleand enter as many competitors as you can imagine. This puts you in front of your target audience at a lower cost than search network clicks.

If you’re not sure which competitors to target, type your main product or service into Google Ads and see who comes up. These are the main businesses you’re competing against and, depending on which networks you join, your ads can appear all over YouTube, Discover, and Gmail.

Designing winning landing pages for Demand Gen

If you’re using Demand Gen to win, it’s important to create a well-designed landing page for these ads. Include key differentiators and social testimonials that show why your company offers the best product or service.

Getting clicks is part of the battle. When searchers land on your page, your offer must be clear. Explain your offer clearly and thoroughly, and include a clear call to action that matches your message.

Defeat with malicious intent: Targeting an opponent’s weakness

But what if you don’t have the assets to run a Demand Gen campaign?

Because high-quality video and image assets work best on all of these networks, targeting a search network may make sense if you don’t have access to those assets. This is where winning with a negative goal comes in.

While we are all familiar with competitor search campaigns, searchers are also looking at other options for the company they are looking for. This is where the wrong intention comes into play.

This can happen at many stages of the sales funnel, but it often happens during the consideration stage when users search for “companies like X” or “companies cheaper than X.” It also happens with branded products in searches like “dupe for X.” While not all of these may be marketable keywords due to search volume, this is where the research takes place.

Building campaigns around our competitors’ pain points

Perhaps you recently heard about a company with a bad customer service record. Bidding on a keyword like “customer service complaints for [competitor]” can be useful in this situation. You will want to keep this in one ad group with a variety of keywords.

Within the ad copy, talk about what makes your customer service team unique, different, or most helpful. Remember that, due to trademark policy, it’s best to avoid mentioning your competitor directly by name in your ad text.

Traditional competitor campaigns focus on bidding on behalf of a competitor. A victory with bad intentions focuses on their weaknesses. Its specific use case involves users who are familiar with the product but want an alternative.

This strategy can also be paired with different custom audiences, allowing you to target users who search these different ways across the Google network.

With a well-intentioned victory to drive clicks behind, however, the landing page remains an important part. If a user clicks on an ad that promises a solution for a competitor’s poor service or high prices, the corresponding landing page must validate those strengths and provide the searcher with a unique value proposition that counters the competitor’s weaknesses.

Identify your competitor’s audience before a decision is made

The biggest challenge with traditional competitor campaigns is not the competitor. Time.

When someone searches for a competitor’s brand name, they’ve usually narrowed down their options and are close to making a decision. This is why competitor keyword campaigns can be expensive and difficult to scale profitably.

Demand Gen and Intentional Victory approach the same audience from different angles. One reaches potential customers before they commit to a product, and the other reaches them when they are evaluating their options.

The goal is to reach potential customers when they are more open to considering a different option.