Since competitors can include your brand name in their keywords, it is likely that when you perform a search that mentions your brand, your competitors will come up in the results above you.
And you might be thinking, how can Google allow this?
Easy, your competitors are bidding on your brand name...and probably with a higher bid than you for that search.
Is there a way to defend yourself?
Yes, here there are a few tricks.
On the one hand, as your keyword that appears below the competition depends on the bid for that campaign or ad group, one solution is to create an ad group that includes exclusively your brand name and if this is difficult to spell maybe it's worth including some variations (remember that people tend to search fast and without taking care of their spelling).
This strategy will cause this ad group to have a much lower CPC since Google does reward having your own brand over the competition and generally searches that mention the brand and that trigger branded keywords have much lower CPCs.
To stop branded search terms from triggering keywords in ad groups that do not mention the brand we propose you to add your brand as a negative keyword in these more generic ad groups to force branded searches to trigger brand keywords.
Dolnai "Brand Query Controller" Tool shows which searches had a much higher CPC than average because they were a branded search that was not triggered by a branded keyword. This way you can make sure that the traffic is coming in through the keywords you are interested in, i.e. the ones that have a better CPC.
By following this strategy you will not only be able to reduce CPCs, but your brand keywords will gain traffic and their KPIs will improve, consequently, you will be able to move the competition down.
