Operation Camouflage Revealed
Our objective is to
present to our competitors weak looking ads, positioned
non-aggressively. A nice side effect is the instant reduction in unwanted click costs generated by our competitors.
Ask yourself, how many times you've clicked the
top 3 or 4 ads simply to check in on your competition? Even though we're
promised by the search engines that they filter out this type of click fraud,
why even chance it? By showing your listings at the bottom positions, Operation Camouflage will
further reduce your exposure to "competitive click fraud". And
what clicks we do get from competitors are far less costly at that lower
position.
Here are the tactical step-by
step maneuvers derived from our field manual:
1. Our first step is to gather intelligence on the precise location of our competitor’s
headquarters. These are the competitors we see in the top 4 or 5 sponsored positions on our most expensive, popular keyword terms.
The easiest way is simply visiting their website and looking at
the address for the company's business under the contact us page. If you
know that your competitor is using an agency, you'll need to try and
figure out that address. You can also lookup the
domain record's registered admin address info from any whois tool to gather
another potential address to target.
2. Next, we’ll need to create a new campaign and AdGroup in Google to contain the keywords under battle. You’ll only
need to setup 1 AdGroup for all of the keywords. Be sure to add all of the important keyword phrases that we’ll want to
be camouflaged for. Because these keywords will be custom geo-targeted, all your other normal ads that are regional or national will not be shown in the targeted area. Google checks for and displays custom geo-targeted first, then regional and then national.
3. Now modify the geo-targeting of our new campaign by clicking the "Change option" link
as seen below:
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6. Finally, it's time to hide behind our camouflage.
Go to your newly created AdGroup, and select
a default bid of around $0.10 or just enough to keep you on the first page depending on bid prices for your main keywords. This
will ensure that for the geo-targeted area containing our competitor’s
headquarters, our ads will not show aggressively for the highly competitive keywords.
Since our ads for those keywords will fall below our competitor‘s radar, they will no longer think we are a threat and will
change their bidding strategy. Our competitor though will be unaware of the fact that our ads are being displayed in all locations
except their headquarters.
Here's how to see what our ad will look like to our competitor
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