I caught up with Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism for Search at Microsoft at the leading search conference MozCon. In her presentation, “What Voice Means for Search Marketers,” Christi provided an overview of Microsoft’s 2019 Voice Report and offered suggestions on how to prepare for the growing prevalence of voice search. Her presentation focused on voice search usage and how to adapt your strategy to take advantage of voice search adoption.

While MozCon focuses on SEO and organic search, Christi’s presentation raised many questions for those of us interested in paid search and brand protection. Christi was kind enough to answer my questions.

As part of our celebration of International Women’s Day, I thought it would be fun to sit down with Georgia Gier, our VP of Customer Success. Georgia was the first woman hired at BrandVerity six years ago. She started as a Customer Success Manager and now leads a geographically dispersed team of eight and is a key member of BrandVerity’s leadership team.

Noticed anything different when setting up call-only ad campaigns in Google Ads? In December, Google made changes to their call-only ads policy. While the changes may appear relatively minor, they have implications for advertisers wishing to use this type of ad. These updates are in line with Google’s philosophy of providing a smooth customer journey and ensuring that people engaging with ads on their search engine are finding what they want.  

For the last couple of years, we have used BrandVerity’s Paid Search Monitoring tool to examine brand bidding during the busiest online shopping days of the year – Black Friday through Cyber Monday. We set up monitoring on some of the most anticipated gifts of the holiday season and see how advertisers take advantage of the holiday search volume surge to attract clicks. In many cases, we find ads that mislead customers and win commissions on unearned clicks.

For online retailers, Q4 is undeniably the busiest time of year. Everyone knows that. Less well known, however, is that this quarter is also a boon to third-party trademark infringers and affiliate abusers. For those interested in making some easy commission income, the temptation to divert branded traffic is great.

This is the first in a new series highlighting our employees! We talk a lot about how important and unique our culture is at BrandVerity. But to understand why its special, you need to meet the people that make the magic happen. Emily joined the Engineering team about two years ago, and here's how she answered my questions.

This is the last in our four-part series on protecting your trademark in paid search. The earlier pieces included a deep dive on Google Ads trademark rules, a step-by-step guide to submitting trademark infringements to Google, and a set of commonly asked questions regarding trademark policies. While this series focuses on Google, the techniques and considerations are similar across all search engines.

When competitors use your trademark in their Google Ads campaigns, there are many adverse effects including decreased clickthrough rate (CTR) and increased cost-per-click (CPC) for your ads as well as a poor customer experience for your customers. It’s also annoying for any digital marketer to see a competitor in the top spot on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) using your trademark! 

Google AdWords trademark policies can be confusing – especially if you don’t have prior experience with intellectual property or trademark law. We have been helping big brands, agencies, and networks protect their trademarked terms in paid search for the last 10 years. In that time, we’ve answered countless questions about AdWords trademark policies and brand bidding. I talked with our intrepid Customer Success Team to find out what are the most common questions they get asked and how they answer those questions.

Have you ever been asked by your CMO or a client, “Why are we bidding on our branded terms when we rank Number 1 in organic?” You may find yourself using phrases like “PPC best practice” or “controlling SERP real estate,” as you try to formulate a concise explanation.