Apr
5
The One Time You Should Be Negative About Your Competitors
One of the basic tenets of business and marketing is that you should never badmouth your competition if you can help it. Unless you have a very, very good reason, saying something negative about another company in your industry just makes you come off as smaller, and might even cause your customers to wonder what you might be hiding.
There is an exception to that rule, however: in your pay-per-click campaigns, going negative about your competitors can be a great thing.
We aren’t talking about actually saying terrible things about other businesses, of course, but making sure that their brands and product names don’t trigger your ads. (This process is called creating “negative keywords,” or keywords that you want to deliberately exclude from your campaign.)
Why might this exclusion be a good thing? Because there are certain situations in which customers are accustomed to a certain item, style, or taste, and they just can’t be persuaded to buy anything else. In those situations, you don’t want those searchers running up your budget or decreasing your click-through percentages.
Of course, the converse can also be true, and there might be times when you’ll want to consider bidding on keywords around a competitor’s product. In general, though, screening out buyers who clearly aren’t looking for you is usually a good way to save money and make your PPC campaigns more efficient.
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