Google Trademarking D-Day May 5th - Are you ready?

Media Week broke the story last week (04-Apr-08) that Google has scrapped advertisers’ exclusive rights to bid on their trademark brand terms, opening up opportunities for rivals to benefit from competitors’ search volumes. The change is only relevant to single word brand searches on sponsored listings, as multiple word brand searches have always been subject to open bidding (McCormick, 04-Apr-08).

Historically, trademarking your brand term on Google was a sure fire way of preventing your competitors from appearing when your brand was searched for. It also reduced the av. CPC for this activity as it had an impact on the sponsored links, preventing other brands from appearing, and therefore providing the cheapest CPC. As a result, registering your trademark with Google meant that you could benefit from lower acquisition costs and high volumes of sales/leads on essential brand terms.
From May 5th this protection is no longer going to be offered by Google, so what will this mean for your once ‘protected brand’?

As of 5th May 2008, single word trademarked terms will be at the mercy of competing brands who want to ‘piggy back’ on the success of searches for rival companies. It is likely that CPCs on these terms will steadily increase as the search results are flooded with competing companies vying to take advantage of this once unobtainable search volume.

Google have sought to reassure brand owners & agencies that they will continue to retain an advantage over their competitors. This is due to Google’s quality score policy and the trademark advertiser’s ability to include the trademark term in their ad copy, which in turn should keep them in the higher positions. However, from past experience this is not fool proof and position 1 is never guaranteed (unless you pay for it!)
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My advice is to flood the available sponsored link ad space with affiliate activity – if consumers won’t click on your ad they might at least end up on your site through an affiliate. Better that scenario than seeing potential customers defecting to a rival company because they have seen their offer on the first page next to yours! And if you’re currently not bidding on your brand terms at all, then you had better start!
This will obviously spell the end of cheap CPCs for brand terms, as inevitably Google will capitalise on the popularity of its search engine, but its better to be present when you’re searched for, than not.

Alternatively, one positive thing to come from this is – if your competitors can bid on your trademark brand term then you can bid on theirs, so go for it!

Read the article from Media Week click here
For further comments from the industry on this topic click here