Bidding into competitor brand terms: still worth it?
A 2024 re-test of conquesting strategy across the top 12 UK bridging lenders.
Conquesting - bidding on competitor brand terms in paid search - was a near-universal recommendation in 2022 bridging media plans. The math was clear: cheap clicks, warm intent, willing audience. Two years later we re-tested across the top twelve UK bridging lenders to see if the play still held. The answer was mostly no, with a few specific exceptions.
What changed since 2022
Lenders got better at defending their own brand terms. Quality scores tightened, ad strength algorithms penalised generic conquesting copy, and the actual CPC on the top lender brand searches roughly doubled.
The audience got more sophisticated too. Developers searching for a specific lender's name knew what they were looking for, and a broker ad above the organic result for that lender increasingly felt like noise rather than a useful alternative.
What the test showed
Across the twelve-lender cohort, conquesting CPC averaged £14.20 against £6.80 in 2022. Click-through rate was down by half. Conversion rate on the clicks that did happen was roughly flat, but the absolute volume was a fraction of what it had been.
Net cost per booked call from conquesting was 3.4x higher than from generic commercial-intent search. The play that used to subsidise the rest of the search budget had become the most expensive segment of it.
Where it still worked
Two specific cases. First, conquesting against lenders that had recently exited a product line, where developer search intent had outpaced the lender's withdrawal - we caught real demand looking for an alternative. Second, conquesting against lenders that had publicly tightened criteria, for the same reason.
Both were tactical, time-limited plays. Neither justified a standing conquesting budget.
The 2022 advice to conquest competitor brand terms was right for 2022. By 2024 the channel had repriced and the play mostly stopped working. The lesson, which keeps repeating across paid channels, is that yesterday's reliable tactic is this year's expensive lesson if nobody re-runs the test.
Capital Edge publishes one note a month on UK bridging finance, paid acquisition, and AI-led outbound. Written for brokers, by the team running the playbook.