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.
Keeping your affiliate channel compliant and free of fraud is a challenge. Success requires persistent vigilance. Akin to weeding a garden, if you stop, the weeds take over.
In a recent webinar, “The Art of Fraud: Keeping Your Affiliate Program Compliant” we asked our panelists, Michael Swensen, Senior Manager, Brand Quality and Regulatory Compliance at Rakuten Marketing and Greg Hoffman, Founder and CEO of Apogee how to set up, scale, and monitor an affiliate program so that it doesn’t get overrun with fraud.
They concluded that there are 5 actions you can take to minimize your fraud risk.
About Sonos
Founded in 2002, Sonos® creates the leading smart speaker system. Once a tech startup populated with nerdy engineers and brilliant designers who love music, Sonos has grown into a global music brand dedicated to transforming the experience of listening out loud to music in the home. Its family of wireless smart speakers and home audio products make it easy for everyone to listen to the music they love in every room of their home.
What trends will impact the way advertisers run affiliate programs in 2018?
On August 7th, 2017, Bing Ads updated its Relevancy and Quality Policy, adding a new System Quality Policy to “enhance a positive user experience by delivering improved ad and network quality.”
The policy provides Bing Ads the ability to limit or remove keywords and/or ads from its platform that have not shown any performance over a significant period of time. In addition, advertisers subject to the policy may see additional restrictions within ‘sensitive categories,’ including: weapons, pharmaceuticals, gambling, adult, and trademark.
We were excited by Bing Ads’ announcement, particularly the additional protection it provides brand owners against irrelevant trademark use by third-party search advertisers. So, we decided to take a look to see what, if any, impact the policy change had on trademark bidding using the BrandVerity Paid Search Monitoring tool. We’ll talk about the results of that study later in the post.
We used the BrandVerity Paid Search Monitoring tool to look for trademark bidding on some of the most anticipated gifts of this holiday season including Apple Airpods, Amazon Echo, Hatchimals, and Super Mario Odyssey. We monitored branded keywords associated with these well-known products over the extended Thanksgiving weekend and through Cyber Monday.
What we found wasn’t pretty. We’ll go into specific examples later on, but here are some of the general findings:
We don’t need to tell you that the holiday season is the busiest time of year for retailers. Right now you are in the thick of it! Adobe is already forecasting that U.S. online sales will surpass $100 billion this holiday season–a 13.8% increase over last year!
Whether you are a trademark bidding expert or a newbie, there is a lot to know about trademark bidding. But if you do an online search for trademark bidding, you won’t find much.
This webinar took place on November 7th and has been recorded. The recording is available here.
