Today in Digital Marketing - Using Google Ads to Target Your Competitors' Customers

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Copycat tactics — how you can target customers of your competitors and not run afoul of Google's ad policies. LinkedIn now has DMs for Pages. The ad market keeps defying reports of its death. And YouTube gives marketers more control over their channels — why you should steer clear.We're looking for a writer and production assistant! LEARN MORE HERE.📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usLinks to all of today’s stories hereListen to NerdWallet’s Smart Money podcast on your favorite podcast app. “Future You” will thank you. GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Already Premium? Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our Slack⭐ Review usUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSInside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin GalesGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Wednesday, March 27th. Today, Copycat Tactics. How you can target customers of your competitors and not run afoul of Google's ad policies. LinkedIn now has DMs for pages, the ad market keeps defying reports of its death, and YouTube gives marketers more control over their channels while you should steer clear.

I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Well, every other Wednesday, I am joined by our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskengales. Jill spent six years at Google and today runs a fantastic Google Ads training program called Inside Google Ads.

Hello, Jill. Hello, Todd. So I have noticed some interesting conversations on LinkedIn lately about competitor targeting in Google Ads. Can you walk us through? I mean, let's start at the beginning. What is competitor targeting, first of all? Competitor targeting is an umbrella term for when you're showing ads to people when they're looking for your competitors. So if you are Lululemon showing an ad to people

when they're really looking for Nike, show them your Lululemon ad and try to get them to come to your website instead. And there are tons of different ways to do this, but the most common would be to try to show your ads on your competitors' websites if they do have ads or on their YouTube videos, to create a custom segment on your competitors' brand terms, or by search conquesting, we call it, by actually adding your competitors' brand names as keywords in your own search campaign so you show up when people search for them. Is that not against some kind of Google policy or do they just turn a blind eye to that?

It sounds a little devious. Some people think it's devious or unethical, but it's actually completely allowed. It doesn't break any policies and it doesn't break any laws. The key is that you can't pretend to be another brand. You can't intentionally mislead consumers. So if I'm Lululemon, someone searches for Nike, I have that as a keyword, I want to show an ad, my ad can't

say Nike, check out our running shoes. In fact, my ad can't say Nike at all because Nike is trademarked. But my ad can say Lululemon running shoes are best, for example. So that's the keys, you can't be misleading consumers. But depending on what your competitor's brand name is, you can potentially get around the trademark thing or you can get creative. And for example, something I posted last week that got a lot of attention is that I was looking for HeyGen AI. It's the name of a generative AI tool. And the first ad that came up was from a competitor called Synesthesia. And Synesthesia's ad text said, hey, generate AI videos. So they weren't actually using HeyGenAI, the brand name,

and I don't even know if that's trademarked or if it would have been against policy. But because it's similar to real words, they could say, hey, generate AI videos and grab attention. So you can get really creative. I've also seen examples of this in the accounting space. You know, one accounting company saying quick, you know, time to do your books. So it includes quick books, but not in a way that infringes on trademarks. So as long as you're not using trademarks and misleading consumers about who you are, then it's absolutely fair game. It sounds like it's a very fine line you got to walk through. I know you're not a lawyer, but I mean, with your background, having worked at Google for quite a bit of time,

do you think that you could say and claim it under fair comment or fair dealing something like better than Nike, you know, where you're not claiming to be Nike, you're making what you believe to be a factual statement. How would that, do you think, internally have been dealt with at Google? Would that have been, okay, fine, that's probably a fair comment, or do you think that would have been against policy? You can't do that because you can't use the name Nike in your ad text because Nike is trademarked. So you can't use another company. And that's where people sometimes run into trouble. If you sell Shopify apps, you may not be able to use the word Shopify in your ads because team is we were never allowed to recommend competitor

conquesting. So if a customer wanted to run this kind of campaign, of course they would, but we weren't allowed to advise them like, hey, you should really advertise on your competitors. And we had some outsource optimization teams. We weren't allowed to have those optimization teams work on competitor campaigns because of course, very bad luck for Google to be actively encouraging people to do this. Right. All right. So let's say that someone wants to try this, try to target their competitors, customers on Google Ads. How do we start? What do we do?

Firstly, I will say get creative with your ad text. You can't just use your normal ad text and expect that to entice people who are looking for a competitor. You'll want to stick to your brand voice, of course, but getting a little cheeky or sneaky or funny can be a helpful way to grab attention. And then something else I recommend people try is something I came up with called indirect competitor targeting. So rather than explicitly trying to advertise when people are searching for their brand name, with indirect

competitor targeting, you're trying to advertise when people are looking for keywords related to your competitor. And the way you can do that really simply is by using Keyword Planner in Google Ads. It's a free tool. And usually when you go to Keyword Planner, you type in your own website to get ideas for keywords you should use. But what I like to do is go to Keyword Planner and type in a competitor's website because that will then tell you which keywords Google associates with your competitor. And then you can advertise on those keywords, which are not brand names, and show up on a lot of searches that your competitor probably also shows up for organically and potentially paid. So I call that indirect competitor targeting. And it's a great thing to try if that search conquesting is just too expensive for you to keep up. Yeah. Structurally speaking, in terms of like campaign structure,

are these best to be grouped together with your regular campaigns or should we break them out into their own ad sets or completely separate campaigns altogether? I do recommend keeping it in separate campaigns. You should have your brand. If you're running brand, your non-brand campaigns, kind of your generic category terms if you're running that. And then search conquesting should be in its own separate campaign. Just because the budget was signed to that, you may want to change with some different frequencies set at different levels. And then the profitability, that is going to be very different.

Brand being your most profitable, conquesting potentially medium or least profitable, and then non-brand somewhere in the middle there as well. So if you are going to do search conquesting potentially medium or least profitable and then non-brands somewhere in the middle there as well. So if you are going to do search conquesting, I always recommend having a separate campaign so it can have a separate budget and a separate bid strategy. Yeah, good stuff. Jill, thanks. See you in two weeks. Thank you. Jill Saskengales is our Google Ads correspondent. She's here every other Wednesday. You can learn more about her Google Ads training program at our affiliate link at b.link slash GA training. And you can watch our full unedited interview. There's a link to it in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link in the show notes or going to today in digital dot com slash newsletter.

Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. LinkedIn is rolling out a welcome addition to its company pages, a better messaging system. This has been in testing since last summer, but this week the company confirmed it is turning the new system on across all business pages.

The new system adds a message button to a company's profile page, much in the same way it appears on personal profiles. And it acts the same way a message button on a Facebook brand page does. It lets people start a conversation with whomever is managing your LinkedIn page. You can turn this option on or off via the inbox settings, and administrators will be able to see incoming messages in the same place their personal messages show up. And you can add labels to make it easier to keep track of common topics. For now, though, as is often the case, the API appears to lag a bit behind the native site. So far, six platforms have been given the backdoor keys.

Bird CRM, Brandwatch, Hootsuite, Octopost, Sprinklr, and Zoho. A strange decision by YouTube will give brand managers more control over their channel, but this might be control you don't want to use. As you may know, YouTube recently added a shelf on channels called For You. Unlike other shelves, like the playlist shelf, you can't really control what appears in the 4U section. YouTube's algorithm will show a different set of videos for each visitor. But now, YouTube is letting channel managers lock specific videos to that 4U shelf. This is good for control freaks, but comes at a risk, because the content you're jamming there may very well not be something every visitor would be interested in.

Also, YouTube is now offering notifications for when your upload pre-check is complete. To set this up, visit Studio Mobile, tap your profile picture, tap Settings, then Push Notifications, and select the toggle button that says Policy. Now you can step away, and when your pre-check process is complete, you'll be notified via the Studio app. This is an option apparently only for monetized channels. Mikhail Parakin, the head of Microsoft's advertising division, is leaving the post to, quote, explore new roles, unquote. Quoting from Bloomberg's coverage of this today, quote, this comes a week after the software giant named

another executive to oversee consumer artificial intelligence work, and Microsoft's CEO asked Parakin to report to that new executive. Parakin, who had been chief executive officer for advertising and web services, will report to chief executive officer for advertising and web services, will report to chief technology officer Kevin Scott while searching for his next role. The U.S. advertising market surged by 10.4% last month over the same month last year, marking its strongest growth in nearly two years. And despite the doom and gloom you may have heard about the state of marketing budgets, February actually represented the 11th consecutive month of growth for the sector. The last time the market saw double-digit growth was two years ago,

just before a decline led to a recession that lasted until about one year ago. Now that downward trend appears to be reversing, and analysts expect a strong year ahead, especially with political ad spending in the U.S. and major events like the Paris Olympic Games on the horizon. Last month's leap in ad spending is attributed not just to the top 10 ad categories, which saw a 7% increase, but significantly to the smaller categories, which grew by nearly 15%. Tomorrow, our agency has a full day offsite staff meeting, so no regular episode tomorrow, but rest assured, I will still be in your ear balls with a new interview with a marketing scientist who has figured out the effect that slowing down video has on your brand's perception. So if you've got a product video, you want to know whether or not you should show your product being used in slow motion,

there is an answer to whether or not you should do that. And we'll have that tomorrow. Thanks for listening. See you then. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more.

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