Google Trademark Policy and the Drive for Quality

June 29, 2009
by Paul OConnor

It’s an exciting time to be involved in search and the past month at Latitude seems to have flown by. I’ve forgotten more than I can remember but here are a few words on what has had our attention this month.

Google US Trademark Policy

You may have read recently that the Google trademark guidelines have been amended yet again for the US market.

This change has been introduced to benefit retailers who have perhaps struggled historically to sell branded goods, such as the latest Adidas trainers, for fear of falling foul to the stringent guidelines.

With the new changes coming in US advertisers are now able to use trademarked terms in their PPC ads which is sure to bring about a sigh of relief from advertisers who have struggled to sell popular good online such as iPods where the ads have had to remain very generic.

Below we can see the SERP for iPod for UK users where the change has not been introduced:

Apple’s official ad takes the top spot with the remainder making their best attempt at being relevant. Most run generic MP3 ads whereas several opt for the “|” character that bears some resemblance to “I”. Another strategy is to combine brand plus product as one word – as with Budson.com who lead with.

However, the US is now much more open and we can see below that every single ad showing for the term “iPod” contains the trademark in the headline.

The impact of this change will be that trademark owners are likely to see CPCs inflate.

Prior to the change trademark owners have been protected by a CTR cushion subsidising their CPCs but, with any ad being able to use the protected terms, we expect to see the CTR increase across the board and, as a result, CPCs become much more viable for interested advertisers and making the previously protected terms much more competitive.

The Google change has been introduced as a way to ensure advertisers are able to capitalise more effectively on buzz generated around the release of new products; footwear, for instance. However, PPC advertisers know all too well that many will be out to game the system in order to secure cheap incremental volume which, all too often, comes at the expensive of the honest advertiser looking to maintain a presence on their own brand terms.

When advertisers simply see an upturn in the number of ads appearing for their brand term it can bring about a significant uplift in CPCs. One advertiser in the Financial Services vertical saw a 45% increase in their brand traffic after a slew of affiliate activity occurred:

With the advent of the revised policy from Google it will be interesting to learn how this changes the strategy of trademark owners and advertisers.

Trademark Monitoring

Latitude is well-placed to offer this level of insight with the introduction of our new Trademark Monitoring tool. We are often asked by our clients to undertake sector and competitor analysis and with this tool we can:

- Capture the SERPs daily or hourly for any number of keywords
- Return the Ad Text and position of each listings to understand
o Who is appearing in the paid results
o How strong their offering is
- Return the organic listings to evaluate the cross-channel strength of advertisers
- Analyse paid listings for the presence of your brand terms (or any other terms for that matter!) to see which advertisers are using it

This is an extremely powerful tool and we use this to provide insightful analysis for our clients on a regular basis.

Campaign Benchmarking Tool

Latitude’s intelligent approach to SEM does not end there and our goal is to provide you with as much information on your campaign as possible rather than just delivering a set of numbers each month.

Our bespoke benchmarking tool is a database-driven solution that allows us to objectively evaluate the quality of our accounts on a regular basis.

The time-served Vertical Insight Team has been created to provide this high-end analysis and ensure that we are always aiming for a gold-standard for our clients. After benchmarking an account we agree a list of actions and a score with your Campaign Manager which, coupled with your targets, will be included when strategising for the future of your account. This truly is a best of breed approach to SEM and if you would like information on the Trademark Monitoring Tool, Benchmarking or anything else for that matter please just give us a call and we’ll be happy to talk things through.