Will Google's Adwords trademark policy cause a storm in the UK?

2. Wonder if it will be the slow beginning of a shift away from google onto other search platforms... hard to imagine that happening at anything but a snail's pace, given Google's dominance.

Google are milking their cash cow I guess.

It's going to be become even more important to look after visitors once they reach your site: as they become more and expensive to bring in, only red carpet user experience will be good enough!

Deri

4. Advertisers have to face up to the fact that by spending so much money on PPC with one company they handing control over their return on investment to one company, with even the best search agencies powerless to control the significance such as the removal of BPF and the trademark policy amendments that were always threatened.

6. this will aim the big brand. whilst it's an open free for all bidding policy now you will still need to generate a decent quality score to show for competitior terms. PPC on Google for key terms is now prime time TV within Digital space so to compete it you will need a great site, product and brand as ever.

It's easy to moan about Google but they should see this as an opportunity and still remember what great ROI they have had from PPC over the last 3-4 years. CPC prices are increasing and things like this will make it harder but if you optimise effectively and continue to improve your usability and consumer journey you will see get a great ROI from Google. Rate cards always change in ever industry and this is no exception.

8. Over 90% of the UK’s top 100 search queries contain trademarks. The vast majority are currently blocked on Google – on May 5th that’ll all change. If competitors can place ads on these queries the potential brand leakage could be huge.

Only 40% of the US’s top 100 trademark queries contain competitor listings in the results. This suggests that competitors find it difficult to show on these terms, most likely the result of a low Quality Score creating restrictive activation prices. Trademark owners still have the upper hand because of adtext relevance and historical performance.

Advertisers that previously blocked their trademarks on Google are now faced with tough decisions over how to respond.

Advertisers may want to allow ‘closed groups’ of affiliates to cover their trademarks with brand-friendly websites. Google want to see diversity in their results though so these sites must contain unique content and add genuine value to the user in order to pass their quality controls.

10. This seems like a deliberate attempt to shoot themselves in the foot by Google - LOL.

From my experience in the FS industry, it was the low cost branded terms that often balanced the far greater spend required on more generic terms, and which was used to justify the higher CPCs paid.

What is likely to happen is that affiliates will move into this space, benefitting commercially short-term. Longer term, these brand owners will have to restrict the way their own affiliates use these terms, or suffer far greater cost of acquisition through CPC. As a result they will "lose" traffic to the less scrupulous affiliates. Lawyers will get involved, and the monitoring of the ads themselves will be of great importance in bringing lawsuits against them.

The long and short of it? TV, Radio, DM and Press will start looking attractive again. This is an ill thought-out move by Google, IMO.

When Affiliates are the only people advertising and the relevance of the ads has plummeted to an all time low, then maybe users will go and find a new way to find what they are after. They certainly won't continue with Google, once the Ad-dominated environment they are creating has emerged. Perhaps they will all realise that typing brand name in the address bar, and hitting Ctrl+Return will deliver the dot com website address - and that delivers 1 result in the blink of an eye, and it is normally more relevant than the gazillion results in fractions of a second that google delivers

12. mmm a few extreme responses.

i think people who manage PPC effectively will take advantage of this - those you don't, won't. I find it quite frustrating how many people moan about CPC prices interesting on generics. Of course they are! You will see more competitiors and market activity with market growth occuring it's natural to see CPC prices increasing. The glory days of minimal competition on PPC have gone.

The key thing is if you have a good product, site, decent brand, etc you should see your conversion rate increase to significantly justify such increase in costs. By utilising SEM best practice and expanding your keyword lists you could see your CPC reduce whilst the rest of the market overall is increasing. Lots of other factors for this but ultimately it's not Google's fault CPC prices are increasing.

14. As a small travel company we are currently restricted from advertising many names of hotels / properties that have a trademark restriction by Google, for example Sunset. There are lots of properties that have the name Sunset in their title and we have been unable to market them through ppc with Google.

The problem with the trademark restrictions that Google had was obvious in as much as it was blocking the names of 1,000's of products that had the same trademarked 'word' - such as sunset - in the title / name.

So if I follow this right we will soon be able to do so! Great news!!

16. Your argument that someone might challenge this under passing off is the same as the one used for video recorders and copyright. For sure someone might facilitate their passing off of someone elses trademark by bidding on trademarked keywords, but that would only be proven on the facts of the case not via the existence of a technology that makes it possible. There are plenty of legitimate uses of someone elses trademark that have hee-haw to do with passing off: "buy our Brand X, 10 times stronger than Brand Y" or "We sell Brand Z at 50% off RRP".