Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Competitors Products as Adwords Keywords

While writing our client's ads we saw some opportunities to link our client's product to a similar but better-known competitor's products. I was wondering if this is really such a good idea, so I went to my go-to resource, the ACM's digital library. Apparently the technical term for what we are doing is "piggybacking," or bidding on competitor's keywords.

Piggybacking is common but little research has been done to evaluate its effectiveness. What is known is that it drives up the costs of keywords, which benefits search engines and makes our ad campaign more expensive! It is interesting to consider that Google does not consider piggybacking to be trademark infringement, which is sometimes a disputed issue. Is piggybacking good for the consumer? Unfortunately, the article says that more analysis is needed to answer this question. For myself, when I am doing research for a big purchase, I like to be made aware of competitor's offerings. But then again, I never click on ads.

My source:
"Smart Marketing or Bait & Switch? Competitor's Breands as Keywords"
Mark A. Rosso, Bernard J Jansen

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