We've recently been finding some ads appearing on Yahoo and Bing without a Display URL. We first noticed this on Yahoo, where the ads were simply composed of a headline and description text (without any space for a Display URL to appear). In some more recent monitoring, the examples we've found on Bing have always included a lone dot in the Display URL field. In the Bing example on the right, you can see this dot followed a gap where the Display URL would normally be.

Did you know that every time a potential customer searches for your brand on Google, there’s about about a 1 in 3 chance they’ll see an ad, using your trademark, that was placed by another advertiser?

Credit: Flickr

It's no secret that we've been focusing a lot on the topic of partner bidding this month at BrandVerity. Posts so far have discussed important issues such as when partners should or should not be allowed to bid on your brand terms, the dangers of partner bidding, as well as the potential confusion and friction that partners can create.

Ginny Marvin recently posted a fascinating article over on Search Engine Land. Her piece focuses on the issues that arise when users search for customer support on Google and Bing. In particular, it deals with searches where people are looking for customer support from specific brands.

We were recently featured in a piece on the CPC Strategy blog! The post focuses on the third-party trademark abuse that we find in paid search, explaining some of the negative impacts this has on retail brands (and others).

We’re very excited to add Product Listing Ad monitoring as a complimentary new tool for our clients! All of our paid search monitoring clients now have access to this new set of reports that we've developed specifically for monitoring Product Listing Ads (PLAs). We hope that this tool will provide you with much-needed visibility into PLAs, helping you make more informed decisions about your campaigns.

I recently had the misfortune of missing out on AM Days London. I was originally preparing to speak on a panel entitled "Crossing the Pond: Growing Affiliate Programs in Europe vs. U.S.", but ran into a comedy of errors at the airport (weather, mechanical issues, customer service breakdowns) that ultimately prevented me from going.

Earlier this week, Mozilla launched the latest version of Firefox. The news got plenty of people (including me) excited about the updated look, feel and features of version 29.

You may have heard about the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability in the news. This particular vulnerability affected (and may still affect) approximately 70% of the websites on the Internet, BrandVerity included.