Google has today released their new trademark policy in the UK and I’ve been doing some searching to find the effects so far.
It seems like a lot of advertisers have been made aware of the issue and are taking advantage of the situation to bid on rivals. Large supermarkets and brands such as Amazon and Lastminute.com (which is threatening to sue Google) are particularly being affected.
One interesting thing to note is that Tesco, the brand that is famously refusing to bid on competitors terms, isn’t even bothering to bid on their own brand name.
My prediction is that brands will be sat looking at their Google search results today and wondering what they can do about the situation. Nobody seems to be bidding on the BBC yet so there are still some opportunities waiting to be exploited over the next few days. Expect the market to be totally saturated by the end of the day as people come back from the Bank Holiday.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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I think what we’re seeing here is Google’s broad matching at work, rather than specific ads targeted at specific brands. I spent some time yesterday checking various brands and there was nothing going on, quite a contrast to this morning.
No doubt today we’ll see some more targeted stuff appear, but also bear in mind that some advertisers will remove their ads from brand terms as they wrest control of their campaigns back from Google’s wonderful matching technology.
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Interesting, so you think that some of these people might be bidding unintentionally on these keywords?
More comments from Patrick AltoftAbsolutely, just look at some of the ads in your screenshots. Some of them are completely random – how many people typing in ‘tesco’ want a home information pack or a research report from Reuters?
great article,
but i’m a little confused of how advertisers taking advantage of the situation to bid on rivals.
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