Competing same owner sites

I have a client with 3 sites, basically genertaing the same leads. I have campaigns running for each of them. Because of a glitch in their system I needed to pause one of the campaigns yesterday.

The result was that the other two sites converted better all-round. (CTR, conversion, CPC).

The sites are all competing for the same keyword, and basically have duplicate content (To the extent that the algo can't recognize the similarity.

My question is, is there anyway to keep the sites from competing with each other within bidding structures other than by selecting your positions to be #1, #2 or #3?

Several tools have what they call a "friendly site" setting that will prevent them from having a bidding contest between them.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Officially advertisers are not supposed to have multiple accounts or show multiple ads for the same search. If all three of these are campaigns within one account only one ad should be appearing for any given search even if they all have identical keywords in them.

If all three are in one account it would be best to decide which site gets which keywords; otherwise, Google will decide that for you by which site's campaign is performing best at the time.

Advertisers have frequently asked how they can get more than one ad to appear. I assume their theory is that one of the ads on the first page is going to get the sale so if they have more than one they'll have a better chance.

It is just as likely that a buyer will click on more than one ad and you'll end up paying twice for the same visitor and only getting the sale once.

Even if someone wanted to break Google's rules and hope they don't get caught I'm not sure it would be economically beneficial to do it.

I am not familiar with any bidding tools but I'm guessing they allow you to specify which site gets to bid higher. That would be more applicable to Yahoo (before the upcoming system change) than to Google.