Google changes Trademark Policy in UK & Ireland

Google have just announced changes to their trademark policy in UK & Ireland that will bring it in line with US & Canada. This basically means that from 5th May, Google will no longer stop advertisers bidding on the registered trademarks of their competitors. All keywords suspended in your account due to trademark violation will be activated on that day. Any trademark complaints received by today will be processed in the usual way but any received after today will only be processed for ad copy and not keywords. As far as I am aware, Google will still stop people using your trademarks in Ads, provided you have registered the trademark properly. The official Google blurb can be found here

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92877&hl=en_US

Personally, I think this has been on the cards for a long time and have sensed a big shift in Adwords account managers attitude towards trademarks throughout last year. Although this change it makes the job of the Paid Search agency harder, I think it’s fair enough and I am quite pleased that Google are recognising that it’s not necessarily their job to enforce trademark policy. In the travel sector, I think this could work to an advertiser’s advantage quite well, as there are many hotel chains with high search volume featured travel operators’ sites that one simply couldn’t bid on before. In finance, I think it will be less advantageous, as cheap, good-converting brand traffic will suddenly be open to competition by aggregators who will push bid prices up. In retail, I think both scenarios will be relevant, as retailers tend to promote their own brand as well as sell other high-profile brands. However, a lot of retailers will already have had permission to bid on their best selling products’ brand terms so it may lean towards the less advantageous end.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Paid Search, Digtial Marketing. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.