For most marketers, a paid search campaign on your brand and trademark terms is pretty much a sure thing. Between the benefits of brand reinforcement, the ability to control messaging, and the additional real estate offered by an ad itself along with additional elements now available in Google like site links and product extensions, this type of campaign should typically be one of your most efficient and powerful marketing channels.
But… the successfulness of your brand and trademark terms also makes them very attractive to others who may want to take away your traffic. Resellers, affiliates, and competitors all have reasons to potentially bid on your trademark terms, and each can damage the effectiveness of your campaign in different ways (either purposefully or not.)
Let’s start with resellers. If products with your brand(s) are available at other online merchants, it makes sense that these merchants would want to advertise on searches for relevant terms so that they can generate sales from their sites. The problem is that their ads could start to outrank yours or start to drive up your CPCs if not monitored. And there’s a risk that potential buyers may not purchase your product from a reseller if it has strong competition from other brands on that site.
Affiliates, on the other hand, do want traffic to go to your site – they just want it to go through their ad instead of yours so they can get the credit (and commissions) for any sales. This can also cause CPCs to rise, but there’s another more damaging situation that can come up as well. Many times affiliates try to structure an ad so that it looks “official,” even to the point of hijacking your actual site URL in an effort to maximize effectiveness. This practice can potentially lead to the affiliate’s ad taking over paid search impressions for your brand terms completely, resulting in much more costly transactions and lack of control over your brand messaging.
Finally, there are true competitors whose goal is clearly to get traffic to their site instead of yours. To them, bidding on your brand terms offers an opportunity to compete for visitors who are more likely to be in a buying mode compared to visitors from generic term search results. Competitors can also promote offers that may target specific competitive advantages they think might persuade someone searching for your site to go to theirs instead. The damage here can range from impacting average CPCs on your brand terms to effectively stealing potential customers away. And unlike with resellers and affiliates – you obviously won’t get anything from the sales your competitors make.
So what do you do? The biggest difficulty with brand and trademark issues is that while Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing have various rules in place to help prevent some types of trademark bidding, it’s still sort of a wild-wild-west attitude when it comes to catching or putting any sorts of controls around who is bidding on your brand – especially in Google which is the most impactful of the three engines to your business.
Also, catching “offenders” is a challenge. Most smart marketers know how to block ads from showing in locations they assume are being monitored, and some may even employ scheduling tactics so their ads show outside of normal business hours to try and avoid scrutiny. In the case of affiliates, it’s also difficult to catch hijackers who may duplicate your exact ad word for word so that you wouldn’t even know the ad wasn’t yours unless you traced the actual URL path to see whether or not it redirected with an affiliate’s link before landing on your site.
Ultimately, it’s crucial to develop a formal trademark monitoring process that accounts for the above challenges (or employ an agency/service for the task) and take appropriate actions to try and stop or control how others are bidding on your terms.
When you catch a competitor doing something you don’t like, you can ask them to stop. Many times they will, simply because they wouldn’t want you to do the same to them.
In the case of resellers and affiliates, ask them to limit the types of terms they bid on and cap their bids at a certain amount to minimize their impact on your CPCs. Also, be sure to put restrictions on brand bidding in your agreements with affiliates and resellers if they aren’t there already. This can help minimize issues in the future.
With the right tools in place, trademark issues can be managed efficiently, and your brand can be more fully under your control again!
