So after all the hoopla about Google removing the trademark protection from its Adwords system (of which I only got chance to write about once as I was too busy doing something about it at work!) what was the outcome?  The removal happened on Monday (bank holiday, coincidence? I think not) while most of us were enjoying the good weather or a badly played round of golf in my case.  You can be damn sure there were no affiliates out on the golf course as they were all in-doors getting on as many brand terms as possible to make the most of the changes.

The net affect from what I have seen is the obvious rise in brand ownerships CPCs (about 30-60p increase on average) which is a big deal if you are somebody who relies no their brand sales to bring down the overall cost of the medium.   Affiliates and clued up competitors are having a field day at the moment with not many people following Tesco’s moral stance of not bidding on competitors terms.  I personally think it will all begin to die down as people realise the inflated CPCs they are going to have to pay to bid on competitors terms due to their lack of quality score will see a lot of them decide it is not worth the bother.  But many companies are going to have to review their affiliate strategy and make sure they have clear guidelines on what is allowed and what isn’t otherwise they will end up paying out a small fortune to affiliates who are doing nothing more than brand bidding.

So Google have finally done it.  Sacrificed their morals on trademark protection in the name of more revenue by opening up all brand terms, whether registered trademarks or not, to anybody who chooses to bid on them.  This has been their system in the US and Canada for a while now and their arguement is that it provides a better user experience by offering the searcher companies which provide the same product or service as the one whose trademark they have searched for.  The changes will come into play on May 5th and from this point any advertiser will be free to bid for any brand terms they choose.  Fittingly this is a bank holiday in the UK and so the mayhem which will undoubtedly unfold will do so when the majority of industry representatives are away from work!  If you remember what happened when Google made changes to their minimum bid system (and it all went t*ts up!) it makes you wonder whether this date has been set intentionally by the big G.

So cue brands bidding on other brands, hiking the prices out of spite and affiliates of a field day.  But will this be the case?  No doubt initially companies will begin to bid on their competitors terms thus raising the price the brand owner has to pay.  But how will the quality score deal with this? Well you would like to think the competition will have to pay hefty minimum CPCs to even list in the first place given that their websites will have no relevancy at all to the keyword.  But will the big boys care about this?  They will probably be more concerned with stealing their competitors traffic and be willing to pay the price. 

Theoretically they wont be able to include the trademarked term in their creative but that doesn’t account for DKI which, no matter what Google suggest, isn’t going to change any time soon to combat this.  Therefore a clever search engine marketeer will get round this quite easily.

What do I think will happen?  Brand CPC’s increase, affiliates have a field day, the overall cost of PPC increases, and then when it all dies down it is back to business as usual and people forget the day brand protection was in place.  The trick is for companies to have a plan of action for May 5th, to know how they are going to deal with their affiliates, to develop and stance on competitors terms and closely monitor the first couple of weeks after this change comes into place.  Then to reassess and get on with the business of generating leads from paid search, after all we are all at the mercy of Google anyway, so why bother trying to fight it!

In a recent bizreport article travelocity’s CMO Jeffrey Glueck made the observation that in PPC “most of your profits come from buying your own brand term”. No kidding! This is a basic principle of search marketing and one which is a constant area of discussion between agencies and clients. In a market such as travel where competition is high and price is everything building a strong brand is essential to your success. Glueck goes on to say he is “dismissive” of the approach of buying a large range of generic terms in a PPC campaign. I have to wholeheartedly disagree with this dismissal and say that in my experience of managing travel campaigns it is essential to hold whole range of generic spcific and brand terms in your campaign. Due to the price sensitivity of the travel market search engine user go through a number fo research stages before deciding upon a purchase, they will research different countries, followed by regions of a country and then hotels within a region before finally searching out the cheapest price for their chosen destination. In the final comparison stage they are likely to take note of the cheapest site they find during their search before returning through a brand search. Hence it is importnat to have a presence at each stage of the buying process in order to have a chance of getting the sale. Full article is below, make your own mind up!

article here