Google introduces a new AdWords trademark policy for the UK

Google have announced a new trademark policy for AdWords advertisers in the UK which will come into effect at the start of May. This change will have an impact on the way that some companies will manage their campaigns, or monitor what their competitors are doing with their PPC advertising campaigns.

Prior to this month, Google has restricted UK advertisers from bidding on their competitors’ trademarked terms, although companies who wanted to protect their terms had to apply in writing to Google to ensure their trademarked names or brands would be blocked.

Now Google’s new trademark policy for the UK falls in line with many other countries, allowing advertisers to bid on competitor trademarks within the search terms used, although the trademarked names still can’t be used within the advert text, unless with permission. The outcome for companies is that they could now find sponsored PPC adverts from competitors appearing when a user searches for their trademarked terms, thus increasing competition and so potentially causing inflation in the cost of their trademark/s as keywords.

The change has come about following a recent legal action against Yahoo! UK when a company tried to sue them for allowing competitor advertisers to bid on their trademark. Yahoo! won the case and their policy allows advertisers to bid on trademarks as long as the landing page includes content about that trademark. Consequently, Google seems to have considered this ruling and so relaxed its previous position about trademark bidding.So now companies need to be more aware of who is bidding on their trademarks and to consider how to counter any aggressive activity. In the same way, advertisers may also consider bidding on their own competitors’ trademarks. However, because Google’s PPC model is based on a combination of bid price and clickthrough rate (as well as the Quality Score of a search term) the issue of relevancy is likely to favour the owner of the trademark.

Combined with the restrictions on using a trademark in the advert, the owner of that trademark will be the only advert that can display the term, thus adding to the relevancy of the listing. In addition, people searching for a brand name are most likely to be looking for the brand website, so the majority of traffic is still likely to flow to the ad containing the trademark they searched for. The only other issue is that if a company is not yet bidding on their own trademark within Google Ads (AdWords), they may now need to assert their position by opening an account and bidding on their own trademarked term.

To find out more about this change to Google’s policy and how it might affect your AdWords advertising policy, please contact us now.

Leave a Reply