How a competitor campaign works
You add rival brand names as keywords so your ad can appear when someone searches for them. On the major search platforms, bidding on another company’s name as a keyword is generally permitted. Using that name inside your ad text is a different matter: trademark rules restrict it, and the trademark holder can complain and have the ad disallowed. So the usual shape is a rival’s name in the keyword and none of it in the headline.
That constraint drives everything else. Your ad has to earn the click without naming what the person searched for, which is why relevance signals are weak here. Weak relevance means a lower Ad Rank for the same bid, so competitor clicks tend to cost more than your own brand clicks and often more than generic ones.
Why competitor campaigns matter
They put you into a comparison you would otherwise be excluded from. Someone typing a rival’s name is usually near the end of their research, and in categories where buyers shortlist two or three suppliers, appearing at that moment is sometimes the only way onto the list. It is also useful intelligence: which rivals attract search demand, and how expensive that demand is, tells you something about the market you cannot get from a keyword tool.
Expect retaliation as part of the deal. If you bid on their name, they may bid on yours, and both parties end up paying more for traffic that was already theirs. That is a reason to decide deliberately rather than drift into it.
Where competitor campaigns go wrong
The frequent failure is treating them like ordinary search. Intent here is loyalty to somebody else, so click-through and conversion rates sit well below the rest of the account, and a shared budget lets this campaign quietly eat the money that was funding the terms that convert. It needs its own campaign, its own budget cap and its own patience.
Two mechanical mistakes are worth naming. Dynamic keyword insertion in a competitor campaign can drop a trademarked name straight into your headline, which is exactly what the policy forbids. And sending the click to a generic homepage wastes it — the searcher wanted a specific company and needs an immediate reason to consider a different one.
What to do about it
Run it as a small, separate, closely watched campaign with exact matching, a hard budget ceiling and manual review of the search terms. Write ads about your own difference — the thing you do that they visibly do not — and never imply an association with the rival. Point the click at a page that makes an honest comparison and gives a next step, not at the front door.
Then measure it honestly. Cost per enquiry will be higher than the rest of the account, so the question is whether those enquiries close and what they are worth, not whether they look efficient in the report. If they do not close, stop; the budget almost always earns more inside your core search campaigns. And check whether the rival is already bidding on your name, because that changes the calculation from attack to response.