Overview

What’s better than taking all of your competitor’s website traffic in one fell swoop? Taking all of your competitor’s website traffic while subtly making fun of them. At Rock Candy Media, we’re always looking for new and exciting ways to capture more web traffic — one of which is by directly bidding on our competitor’s keywords… LIKE THE NAME OF THEIR OWN COMPANY.

Rock Candy Media Case Study

Challenge

The problem with buying space on Google is that anyone can do it. If you have the funds, you could be the worst company in the world but still generate massive amounts of traffic to your site by bidding on a particular keyword (and spending too much money). Customers end up going with companies just because they found them first, not because they are particularly qualified.

Solution

Our solution to capture more web traffic was to buy space on Google whenever someone directly searched for our competitors’ by their name. This way, Rock Candy Media would show up before them and we’d redirect all their potential traffic to our site. To ensure this happened, we also had some fun in the ads’ descriptions, poking at the ingenuity of our competitor’s brand names.

Benefit

At Rock Candy Media we take ourselves seriously, but we’re not suits. Part of the reason we launched the Bait and Switch tactic was to show our customers that we like to have fun. That there’s nothing wrong with a little industry banter, and that effective marketing techniques can also be incorporated in a playful way. That way we attract clients with the same sensibilities, leading to a better working relationship for everyone.

Results

There aren’t that many people searching our competitors each month, but we know they are potential candidates for us. By focusing our search ads on them, we drastically reduced costs compared to a higher impression campaign, while increasing the quality of our leads.