Pay per click is no doubt a quick way to attract website traffic and win over sales. It puts a business not just in competition with rivals, but big names like Amazon and Ask.com. Such names are using almost all keywords to bid over, so staying disguised is needed the most to earn the best from PPC. Being highly competitive, this approach can help the competitors in stealing the PPC strategy or the landing page strategy.
Constructing a catchy headline, appealing ad copy, and best working display URL, you might never want your competition to steal your strategies. You have spent time, effort, and money over PPC, so how to get that stolen just by having a glimpse of the ads?
After realizing the importance of hiding PPC ads from competition, here is what
FMEAddons has some advise for you,
Geo-Targetting
Being the easiest approach, Geotargetting can be preferred for hiding the PPC ads. For that purpose, get the location of the competitor’s office from their Contact page. The location will be used for geotargetting.
Next thing is to hide the location that you do not want your ads to show up. This could be done from the Settings menu at the campaign level. Search the location from the scroll bar and pick the one, and include that in the Exclude list.
It is not complicated to implement this option to hide certain city; however, it is not effective as compared to the second option. Hiding competitor’s city can also let you miss certain important clicks from customers.
Know what level of risk you can take and what would be the return; after that, go for certain option whether it be hiding competitor’s city or the one mentioned below. For highly competitive markets, hiding city can be a better option, but for less competitive markets, it is not worthwhile.
Block Competitor’s IP Address
This is more effective option to save your PPC campaign strategy or landing page strategy from competitor’s eyes. Block their IP address using Google’s IP exclusion feature. Basically, that feature was meant to block the IP addresses that are not yielding any conversions, but just clicks. The same feature allows blocking IP address of the competitor, provided you know their corporate address.
Identify the IP address of the competitor and include that in AdWords for keeping the competitors away from seeing your PPC ads. It means you are not disguising yourself for the whole city, but for competitor. It is more effective strategy than option 1.
The question is how to get the IP address of the competitor? One option is to send an email or query to someone you know in the company and once you get the reply, note down the outgoing IP address. That might be the corporate address of the office; include in the Exclude list.
Another option is to look at the server log of your website and search for IP addresses that have the location, similar to that of your competitor. Once you find the IP address of the competitor, include that in the Exclude list.
Block On Brand Name Campaigns
You can also block your competitors from seeing the campaigns involving their brand name. You can hide your strategy if using their brand names in the PPC campaign, but it is not possible to block everyone from a city.
You need to spend time and effort in blocking competitor’s ads, provided you are in a highly competitive industry. If you have a small setup and competing against big names, then again this is a useful strategy. Let the competitor sleep unless you win over big market share; that is what hiding PPC ads from competitors means. Test new keyword variations during hiding your ads; however, better optimize the AdWords campaign.
What do you think about hiding PPC ads from competitors? Share your views and experiences in the comments below!
