"Help. I'm Getting Calls For Competitors From My Google Ads."

You're paying Google because you want lots of high-quality leads, not because you want a bunch of wrong-number calls.

If your ads generate calls from people looking for other businesses - and you're not specifically going after your competitors' search traffic - then you need to fix this. If you don't, you're wasting your ad budget on people who will never buy from you.

To understand why people looking for other businesses call you, it's helpful to think of Google Ads as a 3-way balancing act between the needs of:

• Google's shareholders who demand growth every quarter.
• The businesses who advertise on Google and want high-quality leads at the lowest cost.
• Users - people who use Google to find what they're looking for.

At the moment it feels like the way Google matches searches to adverts favours Google at the expense of advertisers and users.

For example, I've got a client who advertises on searches for waterproofing contractors. Someone searching for a waterproofing contractor is likely to be a good lead.

But, Google shows my client's ads to people who are searching for other waterproofing contractors by name. Here are a few of the things people Googled that caused my client's ad to show:

• Prominent Roofing
• Wilcote
• Clad-All Roofing
• RPS Group
• ProServices
• Carlisle Waterproofing
• Fix-A-Leak

Google gets paid every time someone clicks on my client's ad - even if they were looking for Prominent Roofing, Wilcote or one of the other contractors.

This is good for Google.

It's not good for my client.

And it's not good for the person searching. They clicked the call button expecting to speak to the business they searched for.

Google might change the balance in the future, but right now it's up to us to stop Google Ads generating calls for other businesses.

How to Stop Google Ads Generating Calls for Other Businesses.

In a perfect world, people would carefully check the domain name in the tiny text on the ad before hitting the but click-to-call button. But if you're getting calls for other businesses, it's proof that people aren't that careful.

Here are some things you could do to reduce the problem of wrong-number calls. They all come with trade-offs, so you'll have to figure out which trade-offs you can accept.

Optimize Your Campaigns for Qualified Leads, Not Just Calls or Form Fills.

This is my preferred approach, which is why I've listed it first.

There is a way to tell Google which leads are a good fit for your business. In Google-speak, it's called uploading offline conversions. You report which calls and form fills were from qualified leads, and Google uses this information to try to get you more qualified leads. Over time, you get more good leads and fewer wrong numbers.

It takes some work to set it up, which is why a lot of businesses don't do this, but it's vital. If you don't optimize for qualified leads, you end up paying for leads you can't ever sell to.

Use Exact Match Keywords.

Exact match keywords are better than phrase or broad match at keeping your ads away from business name searches.

The trade-off of using only exact match keywords is that your ads will show to fewer people. In some cases, this might mean that your ads show so seldom that they're no longer a viable source of new leads.

When I use this approach I mitigate the drop in traffic by adding as many exact match keywords as I can find. In some cases I've had 200 - 300 keywords giving only a few clicks every month.

Add Competitor Names as Negative Keywords.

I review the search terms report and add competitor names as negative keywords regularly. This isn't bulletproof because Google doesn't show all the searches that triggered your ads but, it does help.

Remove Your Phone Number From Your Ads.

I'm mentioning this because it is something you could do.

The trade-off is that it will stop calls from potential clients too. And it doesn't stop people who don't read carefully from clicking your ad.

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