Google’s AdWords policy change, which comes into effect from 5^th May, removes restrictions on non-brand owners from bidding on trademarked terms. The change only applies to trademarks held in the UK and Ireland and brings these two countries into line with Google’s trademark policy in the United States. Under the new policy, advertisers can still complain to Google if other advertisers use their trademarked term in ad text.

The change will make it necessary for advertisers to bid on their own brand terms to avoid losing brand term traffic to competitors. In the past it has been possible for an advertiser to avoid using paid search for brand terms, relying instead on a top organic listing and on Google to prevent competing advertisers from displaying ads for their brand terms. The increased competition on brand keywords from other advertisers will make it more expensive for an advertiser to bid on its own brand terms.

Trademark owners should benefit from a better quality score than competitors, meaning that they can achieve a lower cost per click and a higher ad position than competing advertisers. This is because the keyword will appear in their ad text and landing pages, while clickthrough rates will be much higher than for competitors.

The impact of the change will be mitigated by the fact that no one was completely trademark protected in the first place, and many advertisers had already factored this into their campaigns by bidding on extensive spelling variations and misspellings of their own brand terms. While previously companies could protect registered trademark terms, they couldn’t protect misspellings and many individual product names. Additionally, the broad match feature triggers related terms and this means there is no guarantee that an advertiser is fully protected under the current policy.

Who stands to benefit?

Google stands to gain most here, with advertising revenues set for a boost due to a higher cost per click and potentially more clicks on trademark terms as more ads compete for space on the search engine results page.

Others standing to benefit will be new market entrants or smaller, less established brands. The policy change will allow smaller brands to associate themselves with the established names in their sector.

The other advertisers most likely to benefit from the new policy rules will be those selling goods or offering services that are considered to be a commodity, where the price or convenience of the good or service matters more than who is offering it. Trustworthiness will remain a differentiating factor here, and internet users will still continue to prefer websites that they have transacted on in the past, as long as the experience was positive.

Altogether Digital’s response to the change

Some of the actions we are taking in light of the change are to:

• Revise brand based campaigns to ensure that advertisers are achieving full coverage for their own brand terms
• Create competitor brand keyword campaigns where appropriate
• Monitor who is bidding on our brand terms to asses any risks (and possibly to return the favour)
• Closely monitor impressions and clickthrough rates as a measure of lost traffic

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