Competitive PPC bidding on trademarks

An increasing trend within pay-per-click advertising these days is for competitor companies to bid on keywords so that they appear when a user may be looking for your company name. This may be through an intentional trademark infringement or down to the creative use of keyword bidding, but either way, it is a frustrating technique that can potentially take business away from your own website.

There have been instances with three of our clients over the past month where competitive bidding has displayed one or more competitor companies when searching for their distinctive company name. Therefore competitors are attempting to attract traffic from users searching for the original company, either by passing themselves off as the business or by trying to benefit from the brand awareness generated by advertising or PR spend.

Both Google Ads (AdWords) and Overture have policies about the use of trademarks within pay-per-click advertising activity, although in many cases it is not necessarily a clear-cut case and also both companies prefer to avoid getting involved in disputes and recommend any direct action to be taking between the advertising companies concerned.

Google’s policy about trademark complaints within their AdWords listings is set out here. Essentially they do not wish to arbitrate between disputing companies, but will consider ‘reasonable complaints’ where distinctive trademarks are being used, or where advertisers are attempting to pass themselves off as another company, based on the way the adverts are written. In these cases they will remove the offending adverts, although if generic terms are being used to display adverts then the decision is much harder and often can’t be challenged.

Overture
(now rebranding as Yahoo! Search Marketing) takes a similar stance and they do require that all search terms that a company bids on comply with their
listing guidelines and are relevant, otherwise their editorial control is likely to disallow these in the first place. Interestingly, Overture says that any advertiser that refers to another company’s trademark ‘must be using that trademark fairly on its website’.

So what can be done if this happens to your business? Firstly, you can contact the company concerned to warm them off, although in many cases, if they are prepared to do this sort bidding activity, then they will probably ignore your approach. You should then contact Google or Overture with the relevant details of the disputed terms and adverts, with the valid reasons for the requested removal. Although both of these companies will probably deny this, it is probably true that your negotiating position will also be strengthened by the level of PPC spend you have with them!

If you would like more information about this issue and what chances of success you may have if a competitor is bidding against your business name or trademarks, please contact us for more details.

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