How to prevent competitors from seeing your AdWords ads
For whatever reason, you might decide you don’t want your competitors from seeing your AdWords ads. The reason can be as simple as suspecting your competitor might be clicking on your ads or perhaps a competitor keeps stealing your ad copy. Or you could just want your competitor to be searching for the golden keywords and not see any of your ads in sight, giving them the false sense of security that you must have pulled all your AdWords ads. And, of course, there are more nefarious reasons why one might want to do this
By preventing your competitors from seeing your ads, it can also help preventing bidding wars for your best converting keywords. If Ad Ranks are equal between you and your competitor, top dollar wins. And if your competitors sit at their desks, checking their best keyword phrase and see themselves firmly planted at the top, they won’t bid higher and displace you from the top… even when the rest of the world clearly sees you at the top. It wouldn’t be the first time an advertiser sees their positioning data in AdWords and assume it must be some kind of glitch, or something to do with quality score, because when they search they can’t see anyone else’s ad above their own. And if they can’t see you are above them, they won’t start trying to outbid you, which means not only are you preventing your competitors from seeing your ads, you are also saving money by doing so.
So if you are wanting to block your competitors from seeing your AdWords ads, here are a couple of methods that will allow you to do this.
Geo-targeting against your competitors
Do you know were your competitors are located? Ideally, they are located in a less populated area where you can block a specific location or region from displaying your ads, or show your ads to other states only. However, if it is in a larger metropolitan area, such as New York City or Los Angeles, you have to take into account that you could be blocking a big chunk of potential traffic too.
There are two ways you can do this – by setting up campaigns for specific regions, or the far easier one of targeting all geographic locations, such as the entire United States, and then exclude specific regions. To exclude specific regions, you need to edit on a campaign level:
On the Campaign Summary page, click the checkbox next to each campaign you wish to edit.
- Click Edit Settings.
- Click Edit next to Locations to change your campaign’s target locations.
- Once you’ve selected locations to target, click ‘Exclude areas within selected locations.’
- Browse the list of available areas and select those you’d like to exclude.
- Click Done excluding.
- Click Finished.
- Click Save Changes.
Don’t forget to take into account if your competitor has two partners located in completely different areas of the country, it is much more common than you think. If you aren’t sure, check whois data and “about us” pages. And if they have open profiles on LinkedIn or Facebook, many often list their locations, or if they are on Twitter, check and see if they have listed a location or have twittered something about their location recently. Or just ask others, someone is bound to know!
Do be aware there is the Ad Preview Tool which can work around your settings, as it allows advertisers to see ads in various countries and regions. But most advertisers tend to check regular Google results, and only use the Ad Preview Tool when making sure their own geo-targeting is working correctly.
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