Google Adwords – Bidding on trademarks starts today

Google continually changes the rules for their products. Back in 2005 I used to do a lot of adwords for myself. This was before I had staff or office rent. Back then I was able to sell other people’s products and not even have my own website. It was great fun. Every month I used to go to the post office and pick up my USD cheques. That’s when the USD was worth a lot more than it is now and the CPC I was paying was around 15 cents, so great profits! Every morning I used to get up and check my various affiliate accounts and of course my adwords account.

Google Adwords Rule Change

I can’t remember exactly when it was, probably 2006 I think, Google changed the rules. You could no longer have an adwords account so that it was purely setup with your clickbank link and you had to have your own site. Basically they killed a lot of income for a lot of people overnight and no doubt a good chunk of revenue for themselves. That’s when I got more heavily involved in SEO and started doing the weekly video. Well Google has changed the rules again and unlike some of their rule changes over the years, this one presents opportunities for you to make more money… after you spend a bit of course.

Trademark Bidding Benefits

Up until today you have not been able to use someone else’s trademark as a keyword in your Adwords campaigns. If you did, most likely your campaign would be automatically flagged and not be able to run. If you have a brand or an offering that is not well known you can now put it in front of people searching for the bigger household names for a fraction of the cost. For instance if someone searches for Nike, Adidas can have an ad appear. Hijacking someone’s brand in an adwords campaign is nothing new but hijacking a trademark is. What I have found with some of our ecommerce customers is that bidding on a competitors brand can result in some very high quality traffic. You have to be clever about it though. In the ad below you can see that the ANZ Bank is bidding on the CBA brand (Is that a trademark?).

I don’t recall seeing this a week ago when I checked.

3 Tips To Targeting Trademarks

1. Like all adwords campaigns you must of course be relevant. You need to stay laser focused on your choice of keywords you are bidding on, the user intent and of course your adcopy.
2. Use negative keywords. If you are targeting people looking for a home loan with “CBA interest rates” you don’t want your ad coming up when people are looking for good rates for their deposits. Use deposits and their variants so your ads don’t appear. This will also help your quality score.
3. Sound fresh & urgent. The user is already searching for a trademark. They have already made a choice. You have to jolt them from that with the key phrase you have chosen to bid on and your adcopy. For instance you may target unhappy customers using a competitors trademark in the search. Letting users know you have a sale on right now is also effective. A user might be looking for the best price on an item that is trademarked, you can now get in front of that customer quickly and for the most part, cheaply.