Competing product names

Whats your approach?

[sniffer]

Whats is your experience with competing product names?

Say you sell one brand of vacuum cleaner, but there are other brands on the market. Do you place the other brand names as negative keywords, or let the generic desription catch people searching for that brand

eg

[Vacuum Cleaners]
"Vacuum Cleaners"

-competing brand

Do you make sales by letting people come into your site who have typed in a competing brand, and try and sell them what you think is a better product?

I have been blocking them out, but might change if some think it can work...

[poster_boy]

Do you make sales by letting people come into your site who have typed in a competing brand, and try and sell them what you think is a better product?

Those who query brand names are significantly more likely to buy than those searching for broader terms... therefore, I'd show my ad to anyone who searched for any related brand name. Those searching for competitors are less qualified than those searching for the primary brand, but they still represent a very profitable segment of shoppers...

[justshelley]

Brand names and product names for both your products and for your competitors products are often your best converting keywords. My clients have used them successfully for years in their AdWords campaigns.

There are a couple of things you may want to consider when using a competitor's company name or product names mixed in with your general keywords or as stand alone keywords:

1) Don't use them with dynamic ads. Then it looks like you are actually selling XYZ's products. That will get you in trouble with both Google and with your competitor.

2) I have had a couple of clients get legal letters asking them to stop using trademarked keywords. I have never had a client get sued or had their competitor follow through on their legal threats...but you take that risk if you continue using his trademarked keywords after he asks you to stop. Even if you don't actually use keywords that include his company and product names, unless you use negative terms for those keywords, it is virtually impossible for your competitor to stop your ads from coming up for his company and product names when you are using broad or phrase matching for all your other keywords.

[sniffer]

Do you make sales by letting people come into your site who have typed in a competing brand, and try and sell them what you think is a better product?

Those who query brand names are significantly more likely to buy than those searching for broader terms... therefore, I'd show my ad to anyone who searched for any related brand name. Those searching for competitors are less qualified than those searching for the primary brand, but they still represent a very profitable segment of shoppers...

I wondered about how this tied into the buying cycle. My first thought was that it took them back to the 'research' phase, and that may result in a bad lead/click. If this is not the case then i guess phrase matching a generic description is pretty much essential...

There are a couple of things you may want to consider when using a competitor's company name or product names mixed in with your general keywords or as stand alone keywords:

1) Don't use them with dynamic ads. Then it looks like you are actually selling XYZ's products. That will get you in trouble with both Google and with your competitor.

Yeah that makes sense. I wouldn't want them showing up on the ad copy, though i havnt actually considered the technique of using alt brand names more aggressively. I'll give it a try.