actinic
online marketing blog
Monday, April 7, 2008
Beating The Adwords Cheats - Google's trademark policy change, and how to deal with it
Google recently announced that it is changing its policy towards trademark holders. In the past, if an Adwords advert for a competitor appeared in searches for a trademarked term that you own - such as your brand name - you could submit a complaint to Google, and they would remove the ad. From 5th May, that will no longer be the case. See www.google.co.uk/tm_complaint.html for Google's official statement.
The change follows a High Court case brought against Yahoo! for exactly this type of advertising, in which the case went against the trademark holder. For a summary of the legal ruling, see www.out-law.com/page-8916.
Although companies in the UK and Ireland will no longer be able to stop competitors from advertising against their trademarks, Google does still offer some protection in the form of its Quality Score. Competitors' landing pages will, by definition, have low relevance to searches for someone else's brand, and Google takes this into account in ranking the ads. To outrank the trademark owner, the competitor would have to compensate for this by significantly increasing their bid - probably to an uneconomic level.
Shutting competitors out
In the case of Actinic, we have already seen a couple of competitors trying to take advantage of this change. But in our case, we not only bid on our own name, we allow any of our recognised partners to bid on it too. Because their sites are also relevant to the search, they have a better quality score than the competitors - and the competitors appear at the bottom of the list.
The mathematics of this means that if you and nine partners such as resellers or affiliates all bid on your brand name, you can push your competitors completely off the first page of search results.
# posted by Bruce Townsend @ 1:48 AM 
