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Stop Paying Top Dollar to Poach Competitor Clicks

October 9, 2026

WordStream's latest says what every PPC manager already feels in their chest: bidding on a competitor's name in Google Ads has turned into an auction with no ceiling. You're paying premium CPC to show up under someone else's brand, and so is everyone else chasing that exact prospect, which is how you end up bidding yourself into a loss just to appear next to "The Marq" in search results.

Here's the actual move. Instead of fighting for position on your competitor's branded terms, go after the searches happening one step earlier: generic intent terms like "2 bedroom apartments near [employer]" or "pet friendly apartments [submarket]," paired with ad copy that names the thing your competitor doesn't offer. You're not outbidding them for their own name. You're just getting to the renter before they've picked a name to search.

The other lever is landing page specificity. If someone searches a competitor's community name and you're running them to your generic homepage, you've already lost, no matter what you bid. A comparison page or a page built around the thing you beat them on, parking, square footage, move-in date, converts that traffic at a fraction of the cost per lead.

None of this is secret. It's just slower than typing a competitor's name into the keyword box and hoping budget solves it. Budget doesn't solve a strategy problem, it just makes the strategy problem more expensive.

Source: WordStream, October 8, 2026