Weekly alert on who is bidding on your brand name in Google

Every Monday at 8am, show me who is bidding on our brand name in Google.

Start by reading our brand terms and our target cities from our Google Sheets tracker. The brand terms are the exact queries to watch, which includes our company name, common misspellings of it, and our product names. The cities are the markets we care about. Also read the history tab from the same spreadsheet, so you know every advertiser we have already recorded in previous runs.

For every combination of brand term and city, first resolve the city with a SerpApi Location Lookup so you have the canonical location name, then run a SerpApi Google Search for that brand term from that location. Read the ads that appear above the organic results and the ads that appear below them. For each ad, capture the advertiser name, the displayed URL, and the ad headline, along with whether it sat above or below the organic results and where our own listing ranked in comparison.

Then work out what each advertiser actually is. Sort every one into a direct competitor bidding on our brand, a reseller, affiliate, or partner using our name legitimately, or a marketplace or directory listing. Ignore our own ads completely, they are never a finding. Compare what you found against the history tab to identify which advertisers are brand new since the last run, meaning they have never appeared for that brand term before.

Append every advertiser sighting to the history tab in Google Sheets, one row per sighting, with the date, brand term, city, advertiser, and ad headline. Always append below the existing rows, never overwrite the history.

Finally, post a Slack alert to our marketing channel using the Slack bot. Lead with the brand new hijackers, naming the advertiser, which brand term and city they showed up on, and their headline, because those are the ones we have not seen before and need to react to. Then summarize the angle each competitor is using in their ad copy, for example undercutting us on price, positioning as an alternative to us, pushing a head to head comparison, or offering a free migration. Then flag any city where a competitor is consistently outranking us on our own brand name across multiple terms or multiple weeks, since that is where we likely need to raise our brand defense bids.

If nothing changed since last week, meaning no new advertisers appeared and nobody moved above us who was not already there, just say so in one line instead of repeating the full list.