Competitors are different. Our client – the developer of an economy-class cottage village – turned out to be very resourceful. He figured out how to promote his properties through our advertising campaigns.
We tell the story of how the unfair actions of a competitor helped us build an effective advertising campaign. Note that in the case, we do not disclose the name of the client company for an objective reason: this is one of the conditions of the nondisclosure agreement signed between us and the client.
What happened
Initially, the client contacted us with a standard request – to launch advertising campaigns for a new cottage community from scratch. What we did: set up search campaigns, campaigns in YAN / KMS, retargeting, launched media and video campaigns. Including advertised by competitors in the YAN and KMC – they used the names of competitors-developers in the region where they were located.
Everything was going well exactly until the moment when we discovered an unpleasant fact: according to our brand queries, a neighboring cottage village began to advertise in Yandex search.
Technically, advertising on the search for brand queries looks like this: the user enters the name of our client s cottage community in the search box, and the competitor s advertising takes the first or second place in the sample.
Note that such a scheme is not the same as what we did in our work with competitors. We have chosen an ethically innocent strategy in YAN and KMC – we “offered” users who were interested in competing developers to get acquainted with our client s projects. The competitor, in turn, attracted users at our expense, who purposefully searched for our objects. Moreover, when we examined the competitor s site, it became obvious that its structure almost exactly repeats the structure of the client s site.
In general, it turned out not a very pleasant story: a competitor deliberately tried to confuse our potential customers.
What to do in such situations
Let s see if our competitor acted legally.
Oddly enough, there is no definite answer to this question. On the one hand, Yandex writes that under the terms of the offer for the provision of Yandex.Direct services, advertisers themselves determine the content and conditions for placing their advertisements and are responsible for the compliance of advertising with the law.
On the other hand, for unfair competition using other people s trademarks, the Federal Antimonopoly Service assigns a fine of 100 to 500 thousand rubles (Article 14.33 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation). In addition, the law provides for compensation for the use of someone else s trademark to the copyright holder from 10 thousand to 5 million rubles under Art. 1515 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation.
Yandex.Direct advised us to send an official request to a competitor and, if nothing changes, go to court.
We tried to get into a conversation with a competitor, but did not receive any feedback. They offered the client to go to court, he refused, arguing that there is no time and energy to enter into litigation now. You could understand him.
So we found ourselves in a difficult situation: we had to figure out how to return traffic without prejudice to our client. We began to look for information and found a method in which we did not really believe at first, but decided to try.
Experiment
So, the challenge was to actively, but at the same time legally, capture the competitor s traffic. The method we have chosen can be called the hyperlocal targeting method.
What exactly did we do:
- We have collected local “polygons” in Yandex.Direct – highlighted the locations of the competitor s facilities, as well as its sales office and showroom. Yes, it was all a bit like a game about capturing enemy territory.
- We designated the audience: we needed people whose interests are related to the purchase of real estate. It was important for us to exclude, for example, employees of a competing company, or those who live nearby and are not going to move anywhere.
- We launched a standard YAN campaign with customized user interests and hyperlocal targeting. The hyperlocality suggested that the rate on polygons was 1200% more than the standard rate.
Did you manage to win back traffic
Initially, we didn t believe in the idea of ??hyperlocal targeting. The fact is that this tool often fails even without such difficult conditions as we had. But nevertheless, we decided to try: the client supported us in this.
To our great surprise, within a week and a half after the launch, we realized that everything worked out. The campaign was processed for about a week – there were very few views – but after 10 days the first calls and requests to the site were sent. After 2-3 weeks, it became clear that the idea was definitely working.
At the same time, we cannot say that potential customers of our competitors came to us (and the competitor, by the way, continued to advertise at our requests). However, our client was already satisfied with the results of the work. This means we can say: oddly enough, but the illegal actions of a competitor allowed us to build a strong advertising campaign.
Here s what happened in numbers for three months of work:
- consumption – 97,255.46 rubles;
- CTR – 1.17%;
- refusals – 33%;
- conversion – 1.66%;
- conversions – 211 (for a conversion we accept a call, a request for a call, filling out feedback forms, etc.);
- average target price – 461 rubles.
Is this good or bad? Have an application cost of 461 rubles. for a potential home buyer with a margin of over half a million – definitely not bad. Considering that advertising in YAN and KMS is rather a comprehensive story, a monthly number of conversions of more than 70 is also a good result.
The ad was set up:
- Mila Savelyeva, contextual advertising specialist,
- Maria Denisenko, head of the working group.
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