Monday.com Wins the Paid Search Battle

I was searching for a project management tool to better organize my tasks at work. There were a few companies I was already familiar with so I decided to start Googling. Much to my surprise I found a great example of a conquesting search ad that I just had to write about.

Let me first define the term for those who are unfamiliar with it. Brand conquesting is the tactic of bidding on another company’s branded keywords to take their traffic. In essence, an advertiser is using another brand’s equity against it.

How monday.com Does Brand Conquesting Correctly

As the screen grab shows, my initial search term was Asana. However, the first paid search result was for monday.com. Not only that, monday.com was exceeding clever in their ad copy by positioning themselves as a superior product offering and should be a users’ product of choice. Personally, if I were judging by their marketing acumen, I would agree with them.

Marketing Insights

Reaching a Target Audience

There are several items to note from monday.com’s strategy that can be useful to marketers. First, they know how to target their audience. If someone is searching for Asana they are in the market for a project management solution, and monday.com can intercept potential customers while they are researching their options.

Ad Copy

The next is the very effective use of copy. It’s hard for an advertiser to be more upfront than the headline “monday.com is So Much Better” The ad speaks directly that monday.com should be in their consideration set and delivers an effective value proposition. Two key messages within the very confined text limits of a paid search ad. Truly an impressive feat.  

Ad Extensions

Lastly, by effectively using ad extensions, monday.com pushed Asana down on the search engine results page (SERP), making the monday.com ad much more prominent. I initially almost overlooked the Asana ad even though I was searching for it.  I would not be surprised if monday.com attracted several potential Asana users to sign up using this approach.

It may seem as though monday.com has outmaneuvered Asana in brand search. However, there are several steps that Asana can make to reclaim the number one spot for their brand name. You can see the tactics I would employ in my second post, which you can find here. 

If you would like to learn more about effectively learn how to use paid search to reach your target audience let’s get in touch.