PPC Bidding on your Competitors’ Brand: Guide for Busy CMOs

Should you consider PPC bidding on your competitors’ brand names in Google Ads? And more importantly, are they already bidding on yours?

The practice is legal, common, and creates two battles you need to fight. Defense: protecting your brand traffic from competitors stealing your clicks. Offense: capturing market share when prospects search for rival brands.

This guide covers both strategies, the costs of each, and when to deploy them. Built for CMOs deciding where to play and how hard to push.

The Legal Reality of PPC Bidding on your Competitors’ Brand

The short answer: yes, you can bid on competitor brand names. No, you can’t use their trademarks in your ad copy.

What’s actually allowed

Google Ads policy is clear. You can bid on any competitor’s trademarked brand name as a keyword.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this practice in 2025, ruling that keyword bidding alone doesn’t constitute trademark infringement (Wilson Elser, July 2025).

This means if you sell project management software, you can bid on “Asana,” “Monday.com,” or “ClickUp” as search terms. Your ads will appear when people search for those brands.

Where the line is drawn

You cannot use competitor trademarks in your ad headlines, descriptions, or display URLs without explicit permission. Google will disapprove ads that violate this policy, and the trademark owner can pursue legal action for misleading advertising (AdAge, August 2025).

The distinction matters. Bidding on “Salesforce” as a keyword is allowed. Writing “Better than Salesforce” in your headline is not.

The one critical rule

“Legal as long as you don’t use their trademark in ad copy or pretend to be them.”.

Don’t mislead searchers into thinking you are the competitor. Your ad copy must clearly differentiate your brand. If a reasonable person could confuse your ad for the competitor’s official listing, you’re violating both Google’s policy and potentially trademark law.

According to multiple Reddit r/PPC threads from 2025 and 2026, the practitioner consensus is consistent: “Legal as long as you don’t use their trademark in ad copy or pretend to be them.”

This policy is globally consistent. Most jurisdictions allow competitive keyword bidding but restrict trademark usage in advertising copy.

The Real Costs of PPC Bidding on Your Competitors’ Brand

Competitor keyword bidding isn’t just expensive. It’s 2 to 4 times more expensive than defending your own brand terms.

If you’re spending $2 to $3 per click to protect your own brand name, expect to pay $5 to $15+ per click when bidding on a competitor’s brand (Define Digital Academy, July 2024).

In high-stakes industries like legal, insurance, and SaaS, those costs can reach $50 to $100+ per click (WordStream, 2025).

The math gets worse. Google penalizes you for relevance. When you bid on a competitor’s brand, your ad and landing page are less relevant to the search query than the competitor’s own listing.

That relevance gap translates to a lower Quality Score, which drives your cost per click even higher (Reddit r/PPC, multiple threads 2025-2026).

Here’s the compounding problem: aggressive competitor bidding inflates costs for everyone.

Search Engine Land documented a July 2025 case where brand CPCs increased up to 10 times their baseline due to competitive bidding wars. When multiple competitors target the same brand term, auction dynamics spiral upward fast.

The defensive case is equally expensive when ignored.

A Search Engine Land analysis from July 2025 found that proper brand defense strategy saved one company $150,000 annually.

The cost of not bidding on your own brand? Up to 30% impression share loss when competitors rank above your organic listing.

Real numbers by category, based on 2025 data:

• Legal services: $50 to $100+ per click on competitor brands.
• SaaS and tech: $8 to $25 per click.
• E-commerce: $3 to $12 per click.
• Your own brand defense: $2 to $3 per click in most categories.

The Reddit r/PPC community puts it bluntly:

“Competitor bidding can be very expensive and won’t always work.” Multiple practitioners report burning thousands in testing before finding profitable angles, if they find them at all.

Bottom line:

• Budget 2 to 4 times your brand CPC for competitor conquesting.
• Test with $1,000 to $2,000 monthly minimums.
• Defend your own brand first at a fraction of the cost.
• The ROI math only works if your differentiation is sharp and your landing pages convert skeptical traffic.

Tactical Playbook

The difference between profitable PPC bidding on your competitors’ brand and budget drain comes down to execution discipline across four areas: keywords, landing pages, and bidding strategy.

1. Keyword strategy

Pure competitor brand names are expensive and convert poorly. The winning approach adds modifiers that signal comparison intent.

Bid on:

• “[Competitor] alternative”
• “[Competitor] vs [Your Brand]”
• “[Competitor] reviews”
• “[Competitor] pricing”

Tips:

• Avoid bidding on the brand name alone (Reddit r/PPC, October 2025). Someone searching “Asana” wants Asana. Someone searching “Asana alternative” is actively shopping.
• Use phrase match with quotation marks to control broad matching issues (Reddit r/PPC, September 2025).
• Add exact match negatives for generic terms that bleed through.
• Avoid broad match entirely. It kills Quality Score and triggers irrelevant searches.

2. Landing page strategy

Sending competitor keyword traffic to your generic homepage wastes money. The user was looking for someone else. Your homepage doesn’t acknowledge that or give them a reason to switch:

• Build dedicated comparison pages “[Your Brand] vs [Competitor]” with side-by-side feature tables.
• Create “Why switch from [Competitor]” content that addresses specific pain points. Show what users gain and what they won’t lose by switching.

The landing page must answer three questions immediately:

• Why should I switch?
• What do you do better?
• What will I lose or gain?

3. Bidding strategy

Use Manual CPC for brand defense. Automated bidding overspends on traffic you’d capture anyway (Reddit r/PPC, November 2024).

For competitor campaigns, use Target CPA bidding but set the target 20% to 40% higher than your brand campaign CPA (Digital Marketing Knight, January 2026). Competitor traffic costs more and converts worse. Your CPA target needs to reflect that reality.

Start with small test budgets: $500 to $1,000 per month.

Monitor daily for the first two weeks. If CPCs exceed projections or conversions don’t materialize within 30 days, cut the campaign. Don’t chase sunk costs hoping performance improves.

Cap your daily spend aggressively. Competitor campaigns can burn through monthly budgets in days if Quality Score collapses or auction competition spikes.

Case studies

Case Study 1: GrowLeads

GrowLeads documented a May 2025 campaign where aggressive competitor keyword bidding captured 63% market share in a competitive SaaS category.

The strategy centered on strong differentiation messaging and comparison landing pages that directly addressed switching concerns.

The campaign didn’t try to pretend the competitor didn’t exist.

It acknowledged the user was researching a specific alternative and built the entire funnel around answering “why switch?“.

The ad copy highlighted features the competitor lacked. The landing page showed a side-by-side comparison table with specific feature gaps.

The key insight: competitor bidding works when you give searchers a concrete reason to deviate from their original intent.

Case Study 2: Bipi

Adthena published results from Bipi, a car subscription platform that optimized its brand defense strategy.

The campaign achieved a 62% increase in click-through rate and 8x ROI by switching from automated bidding to Manual CPC and actively monitoring competitor activity in Auction Insights.

The same approach delivered $150,000 in annual cost savings by preventing competitor impression share theft (Search Engine Land, July 2025).

The savings came from two sources:

• lower CPCs through manual bidding control
• recovered traffic that would have gone to competitors ranking above organic listings.

The key insight: defending your brand costs a fraction of conquesting others and delivers predictable ROI.

FAQ: PPC Bidding on Your Competitors’ BrandF