Engine Ready put out an intriguing article.
Our goal in the PPC battlefield is to trick our competition into believing that we have opted not to enter into battle with him for prime visibility of popular keyword phrases. If our competitor does not see us on the battlefield for those keywords, he will likely alter his combat strategy into a more passive mode.
Engine Ready advocates a creative use of geo-targeting in Google Adwords to hide yourself from your competitors. Literally playing lame in a campaign that only targets your competitor’s building. It seems interesting at first but it feels fishy. Why would an agency give this kind of information. I think they are employing Sun Tzu’s tactics on their competitors.
Go to Google AdWords Help Center and look up ISP
Keep in mind that Google identifies a user’s geographic location by looking at the computer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address, which is assigned by a user’s Internet Service Provider (ISP).
If you really want to stymie your competition you would need to geo-target their IP-server, but if you were to do that you would be showing low quality ads to everyone who is being served an IP from a server in that area. In an urban area that could be tens of thousand of people. I pity any overzealous PPC manager who implemented this strategy already.
If you are interested in hiding from your competitors you are going to need to find out what their IP address is, and exclude them by IP. Google has systems in place that let you powerfully control your delivery. Rather than duct tapping together a shoddy delivery method look for a simple route to accomplish your goals. Finding your competitor’s IP is not that difficult.
What Engine Ready has done is advocate that the readers of their newsletter use a rock to pound gum into a screw hole. What you should be doing is finding the screw and using a screw driver to put it in place — trust me your campaigns will hold up better.
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