How I (Legally) Stole $118k+ From My Top Competitor With This Google Ads Strategy

In 2023, I legally stole $118,000 at a 300% plus return on ad spend for one of my clients from their top competitor. In this video, I'm going to give you the exact strategy that I used to generate these results. So hopefully you can generate similar results for yourself or your clients in 2024. Let's go ahead and dive in. All right, let's start with a little proof so you know I'm not making this up. Now I have to block out the client's information as well as their top competitor name. Sorry, can't give that to you. So all of that is blocked out. But let me explain what you're looking at in this screenshot. So you'll notice I have a filter from January 1st through December of 2023. And it's a search term contains filter. The contains part. The text that I put in here is the competitor name. So I have filtered all of the search queries of the competitor name. You'll notice in this added excluded column we do have these added and we have specific campaigns built for this reason. You'll see. Here's the results. Conversion value 118,000 Conversion value divided by costs or ROAS 3.34 Excellent results. I want to make a note before I dive into the strategy. Competitor campaigns are extremely hard to make profitable. A 3.34 is pretty rare. The reason, because I don't want to take full credibility for the results in this. The reason it worked in this case. This is an E Commerce company. This is an E Commerce product. They have a superior product to the competitor. We just did a strategy that I'm going to lay out in this video that articulated that and told that story to the searcher. So when they were on our landing page and saw our ads, we did a good job of selling the fact that we're actually better and in some cases we were cheaper. So. So you have to make sure you first off your product or service is competitive to the competitors you're going after or even better. And you have to make sure you really convey that message to the searcher. Again, I'm going to share all of that in this video, but I didn't want to take full 100% credibility. This strategy may not work for you. However, if you're going to create a competitor strategy to try to take some of that money away from your competitor like we did. At 118,000 in revenue for 2023, this strategy is one of the best that I've seen and we've Made it work for several of our clients. So let's continue to dive in. Okay, so what did we actually do to make that happen? So number one, we set up a specific competitor campaign targeting those competitor terms. Again in that screenshot I had to block that out. But we were targeting on search their competitor names. So we were able to bid on generic competitor terms. I'm giving an example like Nike. But we also hit searches for deals, reviews, competitors, alternatives. So that would be like someone who's searching for Nike deals or Nike reviews, Nike competitors, Nike alternatives, etc. Now we really hit them hard when we noticed if they weren't running a sale or we were running a sale, we would actually hammer that ad copy or that sale that we may have during that time. I'll talk about ad copy here in a second. But those deal terms or someone who's looking for a deal from that competitor when the competitor doesn't actually offer a deal at the time, but we did offer worked tremendously for us. And then reviews, you know, at that point they are almost ready to buy. They're just doing some further research. They want to make sure, hey, is this legitimate company or what are other people saying? We were able to capitalize on that because that person still is in that research phase. They're not like ready to buy just yet. The hardest terms to make work would be generic, like someone who's just typing in Nike. Those are the hardest ones to work. It's broad, you're going to pay higher CPCS because you know you are competing on a competitor term or bidding on a competitor term. And we don't quite know where they're at in that stage. Most people who are generically or broadly typing in a competitor name, just like Nike, they may be a repeat customer or they already are just ready to buy, they're coming back direct to buy. So we definitely had higher returns and better conversion rates on the long tail terms for our competitor terms. But we were in this case still able to make money on generic terms as well. That just might not be the case for you if you test this. I would, if, if I were used to start, I would start on, on these long tail terms. All right, ad copy, I talked a little bit about that. But our ad copy called out our unique features and benefits. We also tested compare copy. I'll show some examples there. But we made sure we did not use the competitor name in the ad since that would be a violation. So if you're Nike, you can't bid on Adidas and say, don't buy from Adidas, buy from Nike. Here's why you can't use the competitor name in the ad. That would be a violation. But you can get very creative with the ad copy. So here's some examples from Nectar Sleep. This is actually a search. I was searching for another mattress company. So which bed is better? Compare Nectar versus other brands. You'll notice they didn't use a specific brand there. They didn't say Purple Mattress or Casper, but they called it out. Which bed is better? Compare. So someone who's not quite ready to purchase yet. This is an excellent ad to call to their attention where you can actually go compare. Hey, maybe next Nectar Sleep mattresses are better. Let me see what the comparison shows. They also had. Here's another one, Compare versus Nectar Mattress. Don't buy that other mattress. Again, they're not calling out a specific competitor name. That'd be a violation. But they are using that compare language. We I can't show you our ads, but we absolutely were using similar formats to what you're seeing from Nectar Sleep. We were actually inspired by Nectar Sleep for a lot of our ad copy because we did some research on some of this. I noticed Nectar was pretty heavy on the comparison ad copy for the other brands. So I thought they did an excellent job there. Then the other thing, I already mentioned this, but when we ran a sale, we made sure to hammer that sale in the ad. We would pin it and we would focus heavy on on that ad copy at that time. So if I was running a sale during that time, you wouldn't really see a compare ad. It would, I would just be blasting our sale. We would do that strategically. We would monitor our top competitor. If they weren't running a sale during the time then and we were able to run a sale at that time of the client said, hey, we're going to be running this particular promo. Then we would actually increase our bids usually during that time because our price is now going to be cheaper due to that. And we would move a little bit away from the compare copy and just hammer on the sale that we're running at that time. Generally too, we were testing, running sale copy just for these specific campaigns. We couldn't do it year round for various reasons from the client. But we had different time periods throughout the year where we were running Sail copy and that obviously always works the best. All right, so then number three, we built a specific landing page with side by side comparison of our product versus the competitor and we listed all the features and benefits of our product. Compared to them. So can't show you our landing page but I will show you some excellent examples of companies that are doing this. All right, so here's HubSpot. This is a comparison between Salesforce Verse, HubSpot and so right here calls it out right in the headline. Salesforce Sales Cloud Verse HubSpot. They have a nice little page here, kind of gives you a breakdown. They've got video content in here. They talk about their, their features and benefits. Here's a quick comparison. This side by side comparison always works wonderfully. Whether you're a service software or an E commerce product, side by side comparisons absolutely work the best. So if you're going to be building this type of landing page, do the side by side comparison like this call to action, talk to sales and then some more information here and then they have their social proof and everything else. So excellent page. Obviously HubSpot is a Goliath and you know, they've probably spent a lot of resources creating that. Here's one from Panda Doc. Same thing you're going to, they call out now they're missing the year so maybe PandaDoc hopefully sees this and they, they change that. But this is Panda Doc versus DocuSign. And again they have some call to actions here, free trial request a demo. But once again you're seeing the side by side comparison between the two. Excellent. They put in some video content and then you know, obviously trying to get you to request the demo there. Nectar Sleep like I showed you, their ads are great. Look at them. They're on top of it. They even have 20, 24 in here. Unlike Pandadoc. Here we go. Nectar Verse purple mattress. So they're actually in the ad copy. They don't put purple mattress in it because the violation. But on the landing page you're able to. So once you hit this page, so they were bidding on, you know, purple mattress keywords, then their ad copy was what we saw here. So something like which bed is better Compare Nectar versus other brands. But if it was a purple mattress keyword, it would actually take you to a purple mattress comparison landing page for our client. Our page was very similar to Nectar in regards to the fact that we called our competitor's name directly out because that's who we were. Laser targeting. We weren't going broad on a bunch of different competitors. We had our sights on this number one competitor that we really wanted to go after here. They've got a sale going on so they're putting that front and center. I Love this. Why 5,500,000 plus people pick nectar. It's a big, big number. And then here we go once again. Side by side comparison. They're just showing you savings, they're showing you warranties and they really bold and call out their features and benefits compared to what purple mattress shows. And then you know, they've got more stuff here. A lot of customer testimonials, all that's excellent. Even further comparison when you get down further in the page. So Nectar's page here was a huge inspiration to us. So I will say our page is similar to what you're seeing on this Nectar page Then last one is Instapage versus Unbounce. These you know, landing page providers use Insta page instead get more conversions. They it's funny they don't actually call Unbounce out in that headline even though if you look at the URL it's Insta Page versus Unbounce and it was an Unbounce keyword that I was able to trigger this page. So they do spell it out here though. We beat unbounce 82% of the time according to G2 reviews. I like that particular headline there. What's interesting about them though and, and the one thing I'm gonna knock this page is they don't have the side by side comparison. So those other pages I showed you all had that side by side comparison. They don't have it. And you'll notice this is probably the the least effective of those pages that I've seen or I've shown in this video. Side by side comparison. Being missed on their page not baked into this I think is a huge mistake for them. I think if they did that they would actually increase conversion rates from that. But you can just tell just me looking at these pages real quick how excellent and impactful those side by side comparison tables are when you bake those into landing pages. Okay, so that is the search strategy side to make that happen. So what about display or video? You can do a similar strategy that we just talked about on search, but you can also do this on display or YouTube. So how do you do that? Well, three step process number one, create a custom audience of your competitor URLs. I'm going to show you inside of an account here in a second. You're going to create ads that have comparison copy just like you do on your search. But now you're going to have this more on the display creative side and call out either your features or benefits or your unique selling points compared to your competitors and then use the same Comparison landing page that you do for search. So let's hop into an account real quick. I'm going to show you how to build this custom audience of your competitor URLs. All right, so I am inside of an account. I went into tools and settings and then I went to audience manager. Inside of audience Manager you can find something called custom segments. So that's where we're going to go. All right, so now I'm inside of custom segments. You're going to create a custom audience. I'm going to name this competitor URLs. Then you'll see some of these options here include people with the following interests or behaviors. What you want to do is actually hop down to this expand segment by also including people who browse type of websites. So in this case I'm going to act as if I'm Nike and I want to target my competitor URLs. So we'll do Adidas, we'll do Puma, we'll do Converse and so forth. I'm not going to go through all of those. What does this actually mean? So so. And I'm going to read this real quick. Enter website URLs that your ideal customers might visit. Your ads will reach people who browse websites similar to the URLs you enter. Note that doesn't mean your ads will show on those URLs. All this is is a signal to Google. So what you're saying is Google, I want to target people who visit websites like Adidas.com, like Puma.com, like like Converse.com that does not mean Google's actually targeting people who went to those websites. And now you're basically remarketing your competitors. At least that I know of. And Google couldn't legally do that. However, it's as close as you're going to get in any setting in Google Ads to be able to actually target your competitor website visitors. So Google does a pretty good job you'll notice. They even give you segment insights. You know topics here, athletic shoes, apparel, footwear, etc. They give you age demographics, parent parental status, gender, etc. So creating this audience of competitor URLs. You are now able to target people who are probably visiting your competitors websites now. Now what you're going to do. And again I call out little note. You can't actually 100% specifically target your competitor website visitors. But this strategy is as close as you're going to get. So you create that audience, you build a display campaign or a YouTube campaign targeting that audience. Then you create ad copy just like you did for your search ads that calls out comparison or features and benefits that beat your competitor. And then the traffic that clicks that ad is going to go to the same landing page you use for search the comparison landing page. So let's look at a few examples of companies who I think are doing a really good job. So first, one purple mattress. All right, so here's purple mattresses ad. You'll see free shipping and returns. Compare again, there's that comparison ad copy. Compare brands and you will find that purple mattress can't be beat. So great display ad. They're absolutely targeting more than likely a custom segment audience like we just showed you. Here's a beautiful example by Mercedes. This is a YouTube ad. There's a link here to the YouTube video where you can actually watch the video if you want. In the description below, I'm going to have the URL to this notion doc, so you'll have all of that. All I want to call out though is their ad copy. Learn why Jason chose a Mercedes Benz sprinter van to fit his family's outdoor lifestyle. This is excellent. So if they're targeting people who may be looking at some of their other competitor sprinter vans, especially someone who's more in the outdoor lifestyle, this video would resonate perfectly to them and the video does an excellent job. So again, go watch that video. I love this ad copy that Mercedes did. They're really calling out a specific audience and someone who is again, outdoorsy and they kind of want that sprinter van to fit that type of lifestyle for them. This just very impactful. Out of all of the automobile brands that I saw in regards to the sprinter van ads, this, this one just was night and day and had how emotional and impactful their ad copy was. If I was in the market, I'm not. But if I was in the market for a sprinter van and I was an outdoorsy person, this ad would absolutely cross grab my attention. So I think they did a great job on that particular ad. Then we've got Harry's. Harry's, the, you know, they went after Dollar Shave Club. I think they did a really good job. Here's some display ads though that they call out big brands. So again, they're not using their competitor names. Big brands. Should eight refills really cost 40 Harry's? We don't think so. Five German blades, one weighted handle. 20 million plus customers. Learn more. So they're not even actually going after like buy. It's more, learn more there. Then they have another one, big brands, 40 bucks for 80 refills. Harry's $17 for eight refills. Pretty good. So that is the ad creative that you could be going after. And again, all you have to do is build a custom audience of your competitor URLs and you can start showing your ads to. Now. Display is harder to make work. However, if you can make it work, it's usually cheaper. The traffic's going to be cheaper than what you see on search. But this is a great strategy to also steal some money away from your competitors, especially during like Black Friday and holiday times. This is an excellent strategy to try to deploy because you're going to be ramping up ad spend anyways. You're also going to be ramping up a lot of creative. You're probably running different specials or deals. So put that front center. Target some of those competitor URLs on the display side as well as the search strategy. You now know how to legally steal from your competitors with Google Ads with the strategies that I just laid out in this video. Before you go, two things. There's a link. If you run Google Ads and you want to get an audit from our team, go ahead, sign up. It's totally free. Will give our recommendations on how to improve your account and sign up and you can have those recommendations in just a few days time. Second, we have a group called PPC Launchpad. Totally free group. There's course material in there that's absolutely free to you. Takes two seconds to sign up. And if you have questions regarding Google Ads, any question at all, whether it's search, display, video, performance, max, doesn't matter. Ask away. Our team is active in there. I'm very active in there. I'm personally answering questions. So if you want to interact with us more or you want to be a part of a Google Ads community where you can learn and also interact and ask questions. Again, totally free. Go ahead, sign up for that. I'd love for you to join. I'd love to see you guys inside of there. If not, no worries. There's more content to come. I'll see you on the next video. Sam.