Mr. Greyhat | Adventures into the world of Search Marketing with Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I’ve just heard whispers in the wind.. Google brand trademarking is to be a dinosaur from may 5th 2008.

What does this mean?

Most likely if it’s true that i’ll be driving a ferrari in 6 months Also, those search companies with affiliate companies are about to become a whole lot more important, as managing a brand bidding affiliate campaign is going to win the day..

Official line to be announced today:

As of 5^th May, we will allow open keyword bidding on all terms in the UK and Ireland only.
This means, that as of next month, it will be possible for more than one advertiser to appear in the sponsored links after a user has typed in a search query using a trademarked term.

I want to make it clear though, that this revision only affects keyword bidding.
Advertisers and Agencies are accustomed to the fact that users typing in their trademarked term as part of a two, three or four word search will have always resulted in competitor ads running.

For example, someone typing in ‘Acme credit cards’ in the search box will see lots of different, relevant credit card ads because broad matching will bring up ads for those advertisers bidding against the keywords ‘credit card’. So, we hope this will be a familiar step for agencies and advertisers.

However, despite this trademarked keyword change, our strict ads text policy remains unchanged: unauthorised advertisers will not be able to use a monitored trademarked term in their ad text.

So, ads of trademark owners are still likely to have the edge over those of non-trademark owners because these ads can use the trademark terms in the ad text: they are likely to have higher click through rates; and therefore more likely to achieve a better position in the sponsored links.

This change brings the UK and Ireland into line with the US and Canada which has been running this policy since 2004.
A good proportion of users in the US and Canada have been clicking on competitor ads even when searching against trademarked terms, suggesting that they find the greater number of ads relevant and helpful when researching or making a purchase.

The rest of Europe will not be affected by this change and we will not allow advertisers to bid against monitored trademark keywords outside of the UK and Ireland.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 10:16 am and is filed under general ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.