Potential customers searching for your competitors are likely looking for products/services that you offer
The ads that will show will not be organic listings as the search terms potential customers are searching for are in your keyword lists. This means traffic is going directly to your website and therefore will potentially convert.
These terms are likely to be less competitive
Because these are terms people are going to be less likely bidding on, they will be less competitive than your more generic keywords.
Bidding on your competitor’s terms is going to increase your brand awareness.
Brand awareness is highly important for companies whose main goal is to get people to know who they are and become known in the popular world. Therefore, initiating a goal is so important before starting online marketing, otherwise, how would you have anything to work towards? If your competitors are more well-known than you, this is a great opportunity for customers to be presented with an alternative brand to see products or services.
Reasons why you shouldn’t
You might be starting a bidding war
The enemy may choose to retaliate and bid on your brand name which can potentially drive up your costs.
Competitor bidding is not a good idea if you have a small budget
Its cheap and profitable to bid on your won brand name. But bidding on someone else’s can cost a fortune, depending on how big that company is. Your biggest obstacle here would be the quality score which comes down to several factors including the click through rate of your ads and relevancy. Unless you have your competitors name that you have bided on included in your landing page, Google is going to penalise you for it not being relevant.
Your CTR will most likely be low
Its hard to know the full ins and outs of what affects quality score because it could quite possibly be everything in AdWords. But what we do know is that click through rate is a high factor in the list. A good CTR is paramount to quality score success. It is very important to remember that if someone is searching for a brand, that they know exactly what they want to look for and it is quite unlikely to persuade them otherwise. As we all know, a poor click through rate does not make a good quality score and quality score is what keeps your ad position high on Google and your cost-per-click low.
If you bid on other company trademarks, expect to see your cost increase; high CTR and high CPA. Having a low click through rate and quality score and having high costs is the recipe for a poor performing campaign.
