Fake Out Your Adwords Competitors With Location Targeting
Posted on March 17th, 2008 in Cloaking, PPC Search
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Want to mess with your competitors on Google Adwords? All you need to know is their location.
You can find the location of your competitors through various means. If you know the location of the business you’re competing against for a certain keyword, that’s usually enough. You can also check the whois information on their domains. Contacting them via email and chatting it up to get this info works too.
So the basic idea is this. Set up a dummy campaign in adwords and location target it to a 50 mile radius of your competitor. Import the keywords you’re competing with them on. Make some horrendously crappy ads and really low bids, just for that area.
When they search for the keyword you’re competing on, they’ll see their ad higher than yours, possibly prompting them to lower their bids, when in fact, you’re actually showing up in a higher location everywhere else in the country.
Want to prevent this from happening to you? Just use G’s Ad Preview Tool to check how the ads show up in other areas of the country. But it’s pretty unlikely your competition will be thinking of this if they haven’t read this post ;]
March 17th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Nice preview tool.
But you could just log into adwords at look at your average ad position…
March 17th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Thats kool info.
March 17th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Another dumb idea from nickycakes
March 17th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Pretty cool idea. Another twist could be to bid with the same copy as theirs, but make it choose everything around that city (so reverse of your idea) so they dont see it.
This was a tip taught on the adwords x workshop.
March 17th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Unfortunately, Google often places the State/locality name under ads from campaigns that are geotargeted. So, your competition could easily see that your ads are targeted to “Massachusetts”, etc., and get suspicious.
March 17th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Nice tip.
March 18th, 2008 at 7:45 am
If you really want to mess them up make ad copies that say “XYZ company sucks, charged me twice and never delivered. Do not yous them”. LOL
March 18th, 2008 at 11:10 am
“yous”…is that like soulja boy or something?
youuuuuuuusss
March 18th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Ha! The blogger corrects the grammatical errors on the commentators around here. Good love all around.
Neil, learn to spell. You linked to yourself for cryin out louuuuuuud
March 18th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
or used for hiding restricted terms for an offer that I would never, ever, bid on. Ever. Never.
March 18th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
I’m just playing, I’ve never done that but I have seen that done on offers like blockbuster…back when I was running it hard.
March 19th, 2008 at 12:22 am
I honestly Loled when I read this. Fun idea to try out!
March 19th, 2008 at 12:23 am
On a similar note, if you do a longtail search and find a competitor, rather than give away your search query by clicking [i.e. give them kw data in the logs], copypaste the url from the serp into the address bar. It’ll look like a bookmark or type-in n screw up their analytics
March 20th, 2008 at 9:33 am
seems like alot of work!
March 20th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
unrelated but I used your fun card link on my music marketing blog, trying to teach muso’s about new ways of making money.
You never know maybe affiliate marketing can save the music business. Hope it’s cool.
Cheers.
March 21st, 2008 at 3:14 am
Hi Nick. Thanks for attending my session at PPC Summit in Boston on March 3rd. How about you rename this article Fake Out Your Readers with content you saw at the PPC Summit?
Funny that you forgot to mention to your users where you got this idea? Oh well, at least you were listening.
Maybe you’d like to point your users to my full article, ‘Operation Camouflage’ which was written in in August of 2007 and featured at SearchEngineWatch
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/070814-223815
Here’s a link to the full article:
http://www.engineready.com/company/operation-camouflage1.html
PS I appreciate you making your own screenshot, even if it’s identical.
What a wonderful blog this is, and how wonderful of you to share all your insights about companies that you think are scams, while you casually rip off conference materials and call them your own.
kind regards,
Jason Miller
engineready.com
http://www.ppcsummit.com/day1.html#wtc
March 21st, 2008 at 7:17 am
Jason,
I won’t bother giving you a linkback, since you already spammed your link in your comment..twice…
I have a few reasons for not linking you in this post:
1) You weren’t that good at PPC Summit. Out of the 2 sessions I sat through with you, this was, literally, the only good piece of information I picked up. The rest was hours of you telling people to “test everything” which everyone already knows.
2) I already mentioned I’d be posting tips from PPC Summit in a previous post.
3) You can’t copyright ideas, so as much as you think this belongs to you, it doesn’t, and people have been using similar tactics for years. Sorry if this bruises your ego, killer.
It’s good of you to point out that your presentations which people spend over $1000 on for tickets, not to mention what they spend in travel expenses, are comprised of rehashed 6 month old posts from your blog.
BTW, drinking 5 red bulls and then running around the room yelling generic crap about creating ads != public speaking.
March 22nd, 2008 at 5:46 am
Jason your a arse with a pissy attitude! Mr Cakes - thanks for the cherry blogpost. I think Domens tip to reverse the idea is better - then just do some X tactics. Good post!
March 25th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
[...] time we may want to use a strategy promoted in this great post by NickyCakes. Basically, the idea would be to “Fake Out” your competition by finding out their physical [...]