The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

A few weeks back, we discussed strategies for bidding on your brand name. As we said then, every search marketer should have a campaign built around their brand name: it’s an inexpensive method of generating high-quality traffic. Inexpensive, because nobody will have a more informative landing page about your brand than you, which will improve your Quality Score, and decrease average cost-per-click (CPC). And it will drive high-quality traffic because users searching for your brand name are almost always looking for something you have to offer, and are therefore the most likely to convert.

Because some of your highest-quality traffic is coming from your brand name and trademark terms, make sure you protect those terms from competitor's who are bidding on them or using them in their ad copy. If a competitor is using your brand name, they are driving high-quality traffic away from your site, and, by directing that traffic to less relevant pages, they’re tainting your brand’s reputation.

If your brand name is a registered trademark, you should apply to Google for protection of that term right away. Simply fill out this online form, and be sure to select "All Advertisers" in the "Scope of Complaint - Advertisers Involved" section. If your submission is approved, other advertisers in your industry will be prevented from using your trademark in their ad copy. (A Brazilian travel agency, for instance, could still use the term “amazon”, because they're not competiting with the online retailer.) They won't, however, be prevented from bidding on those terms, so you may still want to consider the advice below, a few practices that have worked for us:

1) Follow the Golden Rule
The first and simplest thing to do is never use your competitor’s brand names. If you bid on a brand term other than your own, it will suggest a lot about your business—none of it good. Rather than competing on merit, you’d be attempting to poach business by taking advantage of your competitor’s reputation. This will do long-term damage to your reputation, at a cost much higher than whatever short-term revenues this type of campaign generates. More importantly, it just isn’t sporting. Don’t do it, and following the next tip will be especially easy.

2) Ask Them to Stop
If you search on one of your terms and find an ad by a competitor taking advantage of your brand, click on it. When you get to their Web site, find a contact form or contact number, get in touch, and politely ask them to stop using your brand name. No need to be aggressive: just introduce yourself, mention your relationship to the brand they’re bidding on, and tell them that you’d appreciate it if they wouldn’t bid on those terms any longer. Managing our own accounts at Clickable, we’ve found that this almost always works.

Of course, they still have to pay for your click, which probably won’t convert. Beside whatever tiny bit of satisfaction there is to be had from that, it also suggests another important point: bidding on your own brand name is cheap, but bidding on another brand name is expensive. For example, if you manage Nike’s SEM account and bid on the term “nike,” you won’t have to pay much for it. Your ads and landing pages will be filled with the term, so your Quality Score will be high and your average CPC low. If, one the other hand, you bid on the term “adidas,” your Quality Score will be extremely low, driving your CPC way up. This is another reason why competitors will usually stop when you ask them to: all they need to do is stop paying for high-cost, low-quality clicks. Not much of a sacrifice.

3) Submit a Complaint to Google
If one of your competitor’s is using your registered trademark in an ad, and contacting them hasn’t been effective, you can submit a complaint to Google. This should only be a last resort, as it is a somewhat lengthy and involved process. Again, this only works if your brand name is a registered trademark, and if your competitor is using that trademark term in an ad, not just bidding on the keyword. (Though Google will investigate marketers outside the US, UK, Ireland or Canada bidding on your trademarks.) Then again, if your trademark showed up in a competitor’s ad because they were using Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI), and your trademark was one of the variations of their broad match term... There are lots of angles to consider, so these investigations take quite a bit of time.

Cases like this will be especially rare if you've submitted your trademark to Google, as we explained in the beginning of this post. But if you’ve tried everything else and still need to submit a complaint about a specific advertiser, this is the form you need to fill out.

Hanny, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.