Building Conquesting Campaigns in Paid Search

Should you build a conquesting paid search campaign? Yes. If you choose your competitors and keywords wisely and build the campaign correctly, conquesting campaigns can have great ROI. (Although, I’m not going to get into the ethics of this approach. I’m only speaking about the type of campaign that makes it crystal clear that you’re not the exact product that the consumer is searching for, but rather an alternative solution.)

What is a conquesting campaign anyway?

A conquesting campaign is bidding on your competitors keywords so that when consumers search for your competitor’s name, your ads show up in their search results.

The best way to demonstrate is with an example…

You’re an up and coming insulated bottle manufacturer ClimaFlask. Your bottle keeps liquids cold when they are cold and hot when they’re hot. Your product is solid and you’re ready for marketing. However, there is a limited amount of consumers searching for your category keyword “insulated water bottle”.

You know that your direct competitor, S’well, has really deep penetration within the insulated water bottle market. More people are searching for S’well by name than even “insulated water bottle”.

By bidding on keywords “swell” and “swell water bottle” you’re exposing your brand to 10–20X more impressions than if you were just bidding on your category keyword.

What are the benefits of a conquesting campaign?

There are two main benefits; sales and exposure.

Sales
By having new visitors on your product and sales pages you have the opportunity to win some of those sales immediately. Consumers are searching for a new water bottle right now, and if your product is comparable, a percentage of that traffic is going to buy your water bottle.

Exposure
The second benefit is obvious. Your competitor has consumers and prospects that are on their consumer journey. They are either doing research, considering, deciding or making a purchase of a very similar product. Potentially your competitor owns the category, as in the case of Swell and the insulated water bottle market. This is an opportunity for you to enter the consideration set of a massive number of consumers in your market.

What to expect from a conquesting search campaign?

1. Using trademarks that you don’t own in your ads is not allowed by Google, that has an impact on the copy you’re able to use in your ads and consequently your CTR and Quality Score are going to suffer. Because of the low CTR and Quality score, Google will show your ad less frequently. A great way to measure how frequently your ad is being shown is to activate your Search Impression Share column. So that you can optimize for maximum impressions and attractive/tolerable CPA.
2. Higher CPC — Low Quality Score and CTRs are going to result in high CPCs. I’m seeing a CPC that’s indirectly proportional to branded campaigns. So if your branded campaign yields a $0.50 CPC and the CTR is 15%, your conquesting campaigns may have a CTR of 0.5%-1.0% and a CPC of $7.5-$15.

How to build your conquesting campaign

Content — One thing that’s important to understand is that this campaign is different than you your other paid search campaigns and is going to take extra effort to optimize. You’re interrupting a consumer’s search experience and some consumers may even be unaware that they are clicking a competitor’s ad. Taking a consumer straight to the product/lead conversion page is probably not the best landing page experience for the user.

A better experience for the user would be a page that introduces your product and compares the benefits of getting your product over the competitor’s product. Once the consumer is educated on how your product meets their needs, your product will enter their consideration set and then the user can view your product pages, choose to add your product to their cart and check out.

Creating a custom landing page for your conquesting campaign is also an opportunity to introduce mentions of competitor specific keywords that you are bidding on. Google looks at the landing page content to match the search query, so having these keywords in your landing page text would create higher relevance, better quality score and lower CPCs.

Keywords — This is where it gets really fun because you get to put yourself in the head of the consumer. It’s easy to bid on “Swell water bottle”, but there are a number of long tail keywords that better match the query that a consumer doing research would type in. Or perhaps they already own the product and are unsatisfied with it. They are looking for a solution to their problem and this is a great time to reach them. Here are some words that would follow the competitor specific keyword that a consumer might add the their search query if they are in one of these stages.

Research:

• compare
• versus
• vs
• review
• reviews
• service
• pricing
• cost
• price
• trial
• customers

Unsatisfied with current solution:

• customer service
• customer support
• support
• service
• phone number
• alternative
• competitor
• return
• refund
• exchange
• cancellation
• contract

Finally there are keywords that might be specific to your product category and might be too broad on their own, but when combined with a competitor’s brand would narrow the scope to match your desired audience.

In our ClimaFlask example these keywords would be:

• bottle
• water bottle
• sport bottle

Ad copy

Your ad copy should make it transparent that you’re not the exact solution that the consumer is looking for. Instead your product is an “alternative” or “solution” that is in the same product category that they are considering. If you have a comparison of the two products on your landing page, as previously mentioned, your ad copy can be something like:

Compare Insulated Bottles — Find Affordable Alternative
Compare insulated water bottles to leading water bottles. Find more sizes, colors and shapes.

Conquesting campaigns are challenging and have great potential for additional sales and ROI. I’d love to hear what you learn in your experiments.