European Brand De-restriction
Google has recently changed the AdWords rules to allow advertisers to bid on various brand or trademarked terms. The rule change has come about after the European courts ruled that Google had not violated trademark laws by allowing rival companies to bid on competitor brand and trademarked terms.
Google’s new rules will come into force across Europe on the 14th of September 2010, along with a new complaint procedure. If a company feels its terms are being used to mislead a visitor or cause confusion to a user, Google may still remove the ad after conducting a limited investigation, however they will no longer prevent a company from bidding on trademarked terms. This appears to be good news for re-sellers of products across various sectors, although without being able to use the trademarked terms in the ad text, it will make it difficult to demonstrate to the user that they sell the product they are looking for. Because it will be difficult to describe specific branded products without using the terms, the trademark owners retain their current (albeit slightly reduced) advantage.
UK, Ireland and Canada AdWords Policy Change
A separate change to AdWords policies in the UK, Ireland and Canada has taken this change even further. Advertisers in the UK, Ireland and Canada may now be able to use trademarked terms within the advert text, again providing the user is not being misled.
The recent change has good and bad consequences for the client and the agency.
Agencies have had problems in the past with Google rejecting trademarked terms in adverts when it is perfectly reasonable. Google will sometimes reject adverts with your own brand name in them because it is trademarked. This simply requires a manual review from Google, but can be a pain if you test new adverts/landing pages regularly. The manual review can take days too.
If you are a reseller it becomes even worse, with half your products being banned from the advert text, in which case you end up advertising “Golf Clubs” when you actually want to advertise “Ping Golf Clubs” – this causes lower click through rates and conversion rates throughout your campaign. Often, the only way to combat this is to supply Google with evidence that you have permission to use the trademark – another huge pain!
With this change, we will be able to write more relevant adverts for resellers, as well as remove the problems of having to get manual reviews.
However, the down side is that there is room for underhanded tactics, such as competitors using your brand name and muddying the water by bidding on products they don’t sell. This may not improve their business, but it won’t do our clients any good either, causing a negative user experience. Google have issued a policy change stating that this is not allowed, but since the review process will be manual, competitors will be able to “get away with it” for significant periods of time.
As an agency, we will have to be much more vigilant in monitoring the marketplace for this activity, and install new processes for reporting this behaviour quickly so that our clients are not affected.