If your B2B SaaS isn’t running competitor ads right now, it might be time to put it on the docket.
While competitor terms might have lower CTRs, they can be a great way to start a Google Ads account with highly-relevant targeting.
If you’re already running ads and looking for more volume, competitor campaigns are a great solution with less risk than other higher-funnel intent options.
Why Competitor Campaigns Are Necessary In SaaS
In the B2B SaaS search world, low funnel keywords have very limited volume.
After dialing those keywords in and growing your search impression share to nearly 100%, where should advertisers get volume now?
Eventually, most mature accounts will look to broad, mid funnel, high funnel, display and performance max campaigns to stretch their reach.
Often these avenues will tank your account efficiency. At least for a while before finding conversions and customers.
A reliable option for your SaaS to bring volume and value to your account can be by targeting competitors’ names in search.
If you want to run competitor campaigns other than search, check out this wordstream article. Although, it’s not specifically for B2B SaaS.
How To Set Up An Excellent SaaS Competitor Campaign
There are many misnomers when it comes to SaaS search competitor campaigns. Just buying searches for any similar SaaS company will present issues.
By the way, some of these concepts will look similar to the ones that build great low funnel search campaigns.
Google Account Structure
For the most part, our campaigns at SCB will have a “competitor” campaign and each ad group in that campaign will represent each competitor.
It’s usually smart to start with 2-5 competitors, depending on budget size.
So how do you choose the right competitors and the right competitor keywords? Here are a few key factors to consider when creating Google Ads competitor campaigns.
Selecting The Right SaaS Competition
Selecting the right competitors means selecting competitors with similar features to your SaaS.
SaaS searchers are often very feature focused. If a user is searching for a specific competitor, they’re likely interested in specific features.
For every category of SaaS product, there is a sliding, three-dimensional scale that determines the position of each SaaS in that space.
For example, say you own a task management SaaS. Your task manager brags unique features and that’s what makes it the best on the market.
So naturally, you decide to target “TaskAid,” your competitor. “TaskAid” has a standard set of features. Some of which your SaaS may not have.
Depending on how different your features are from the competition, you may be targeting the wrong users.
Anyone searching for your competition is going to be relatively aware of all the features “TaskAid” offers and could be looking for those features. Yet they would still likely search just “TaskAid.”
It’s one thing to offer all of their features and more, but if your venn diagram looks like this:
… then you may want to reconsider targeting that B2B SaaS for right now.
If your SaaS B2B’s feature’s stack up like this…
Then they are a perfect match to target.
If your SaaS has the same and more, it’s also recommended to target that competitor as well.
I will cover the inverse of this cart in a later section.
In summary, by first focusing on similar competitors, you will be ensuring that you are targeting relevant searchers.
Types Of Keywords To Target
Most competitor campaigns start with a standard set of keywords in SaaS.
However, what you are able to target depends on volume in your market. And the brand awareness of your competitors.
Appending basic words to your core “competitor” term will bring your competitor ROI up.
Terms which include ‘vs’ & ‘alternative’ can catch users who are actively looking for companies like yours.
Additionally, you can target competitor terms that include ‘demo’ or ‘trial’ to try to snag searcher attention when they are very close to converting.
Targeting terms that include ‘price’ and ‘reviews’ will also attract researching searchers.
As you keep your eye on your search terms, more ideas will come forward.
The last example of a keyword is a feature-oriented keyword, which can be a very useful tool when positioning yourself in the competitor results.
Be Feature Focused
No matter which competitor you choose to target in your SaaS campaign, it’s smart to be feature-focused.
If your competition has a lot of search volume, you may notice your search terms report will have searches that follow a “[competitor] [feature]” format.
Example: “TaskAid Recurring Tasks.”
As long as your SaaS has that feature, adding competitor keywords with such appended features will raise your ad group value.
It’s especially useful to target specific competitor features when they stack up like this:
This way you can at least be sure that they are concerned about a feature your SaaS offers.
The less in common you have with that competitor, the less likely a user searching just “competitor” will convert.
Searches for “[competitor] [feature]” either are looking for information on that competitor’s specific feature or for a similar competitor that actually has the mentioned feature.
Negative Keywords
It’s good to keep in mind that you will inevitably show up to current user’s of your competitor.
To mitigate this factor as much as possible, it’s good to add some targeted negative keywords to your campaign.
Keywords that include terms like ‘portal,’ ‘log in,’ ‘help desk,’ and ‘how to’ will all most likely indicate a current customer of your competitor.
You will likely not convert these users.
Bidding
It’s a great idea to start your B2B SaaS competitor ads in Max CPC mode. Each of the aforementioned keywords will have vastly different volumes.
This will cause automated bid strategies to favor one or two keywords in the campaign rather than spreading it out evenly.
If you already have low funnel ads running, start your competitor bids at 70% of those. You can adjust from there but it’s a good starting point.
Already have other competitor ad groups? Stick to those average CPCs.
As the account progresses, you can set your SaaS competitor bids accordingly.
If you have no idea what to set your bids at, it’s always safe to start somewhere between $5-$10 and work from there.
Budget
There are three scenarios that can help you determine what to do with your budget when starting your competitor campaigns.
Scenario 1: Your current campaigns aren’t spending all of your allotted budget.
Decision: Depending on how much more budget you have, put those competitor campaigns in the account without worrying about your budget. At least in moderation.
Scenario 2: Your campaigns are maxing your budget. However, you can add a budget.
Decision: Allocate some of that new budget to your competitor campaigns. If the budget is modest, don’t add all of your competitors quite yet.
Scenario 2: Your budget is maxed out, and you have no more budget left.
Decision: If your current campaigns aren’t optimized, you should probably keep working on what’s in the account. However, if you have the ability to prune some bad keywords, then by all means do so. Then you can add a few competitor (of equal quantity) terms to your campaign.
As a rule of thumb, you should make sure you have extra budget when starting any new keywords, ad groups or campaigns. Especially if you like your accounts performance currently.
Optimizing a new campaign while under the same budget constraints will hurt your account performance.
Match Types
For the most part, you should feel good about using phrase match keywords.
If there is going to be an issue with irrelevant traffic, then it will probably be with the “competitor” terms by themselves.
To curb this, you can just move those terms to exact, there should be plenty of volume for terms like [TaskAsk].
Sometimes, however, your competitors may have names similar to other brands or just other words that are searched on the internet.
Issues With Similar Words
When your SaaS competitor terms resemble other brands or normal words, you may run into an issue with tons of irrelevant searches.
The best way to deal with this issue is to tighten the match type to eliminate any dissonant traffic.
If that doesn’t work, try adding words that further specify the meaning of your targeted term.
That could include adding the function of the app like “TaskApp Tasks” or “TaskApp SaaS.”
In the image above, you’ll notice the branded result leads to “ToriiHQ.com.”
For that example, targeting “Torii HQ” in phrase match will weed out all other searches.
You may also just want to lower the bid on “Torii” or [Torii] significantly.
What kind of results should you expect from your SaaS competition
The data coming from your competitor SaaS campaigns will look different than your other campaigns.
Some of the key differences may be startling at first glance.
Here’s what to expect.
CTR
Your SaaS competitor campaigns will most likely have a low CTR.
SCB often see’s click through rates of 1%-2%. This is especially true for your plain “competitor” keywords.
You are attempting to change the user’s intent. So even though these are relevant users, you are still diverting their attention.
Don’t be surprised if you can’t get rid of the “Eligible Limited” statuses on your keywords for poor quality either.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rates will also likely be slightly lower than your low funnel keywords.
Your conversion rates will also largely depend on how your SaaS is positioned in the market.
I.e. if your product is a different price point or is aimed at a slightly different demo, you might expect lower conv. rates.
All that is usually palatable. Your cost per lead will usually stay lower due to lower costs per click.
Search Imp. Share (Abs Top)
One thing that most expert Google Ads managers will notice is that it will be nearly impossible to secure the absolute top spot of the search.
If the competitor advertiser that you’re targeting is running their own brand name, you most likely will not out rank them.
This is because Google will recognize the relevance of their own brand and award them with perfect ad rank.
You may very well have a 90%+ in the Search Imp. Share (Top) column, but it will be hard, if not impossible for you to beat the actual brand you are targeting.
That’s ok though!
Summary
Competitor search ad campaigns are a valuable way for SaaSs to achieve higher volume in relevant searches.
If you are struggling to spend your entire budget with your low funnel keywords, this is definitely an avenue to try.
If you haven’t quite perfected your low funnel terms, here’re some good tips for that.
Thanks for reading!