Dealers fall into 2 buckets with brand campaigns on Google Ads:
1) Running Brand Campaign When No Competitors Are
You're simply wasting money and paying the Google tax for traffic you would have already received for free (for now) via your (hopefully well-optimized) Google My Business listing. Turn your brand campaign off immediately and send me 10% of your savings as a thank you.
Pro Tip: Want the peace of mind of knowing whether competitors are running conquest campaigns on your brand name in the future? Leave your brand campaign running with a $1 /day budget so you can still get auction insight data. $30 /month is a low price to pay for the peace of mind it can provide your dealer principal.
2) Running Brand Campaign When Competitors Are Conquesting Your Brand Name
This is a tough situation because if you turn your brand campaign off, your dealer principal will freak out when they see a competitor showing up above your organic listing.
My recommendation would be to create a case study to prove / disprove the effectiveness of conquest campaigns by running a campaign on your competitor's brand name for a month. Make sure you have a call recording line setup on the call extension, DNI setup on your website, and conversion / goal tracking on your website.
After a month, listen to every phone call the campaign generated and document how 95% of the $7 clicks / calls were for your competitor's service customers checking on the status of their car. Document how 0 leads were generated on your website and the traffic had a 90% bounce rate.
Present your findings to the dealer principal that they should actually want their competitors wasting money on conquest campaigns. Let them waste their money, while you spend the money elsewhere on campaigns that will actually generate incremental sales.
If the case study is unsuccessful in dissuading the dealer principal, use these
pro tips to maximize the return while minimizing the wasted spend:
- Use Customer Match data to exclude your brand campaign (via negative bid adjustments) from appearing to your service customers.
- Use Google In-Market audience data to target in-market shoppers of your make that are searching for your brand name but are not current customers of yours. This will prevent your competitors from stealing away fresh prospects wanting to do business with you.
- Use Google RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads) to exclude your brand campaign from appearing to customers that have already visited your website. Trust me; these customers will click on your organic SERP or Google My Business listing.
- Use Google Custom Affinity Audiences to target customers that have visited your competitors' websites but are now searching for you. Don't let your competitor steal them back.
^^
follow these same tips if your brand name is a generic geo name.
These tips will accomplish the following:
- Decrease your brand campaign spend by as much as 75%.
- Guarantee that you only capture the highest sales-intent customers that you *might* have lost to a competitor.
- Replace 99% of your "missed" paid brand campaign traffic with organic brand traffic from your SERP and Google My Business listing.
- Allow you to reallocate the spend to campaigns that will generate incremental sales.
- Make your dealer principal happy.
The exception to the rule: Sub-prime dealers
Sub-prime dealers are the one exception to the rule where it can absolutely make sense to run conquest / brand campaigns. If you have a well-known subprime competitor in the market, you can ride the coattails of their massive traditional tv / radio ad spend and name recognition by running conquest campaigns on their brand name. Just make sure your ad copy and landing page are really optimized for converting the traffic into leads.
This also applies in the reverse situation: if you are a well-known subprime dealer, make sure to protect your brand name from competitors looking to capitalize on your name recognition and tv / radio spend.
