It is always advisable to protect your brand name by purchasing an advert for it as a keyword.
This will ensure that searchers looking for your brand name can always find you. The price of each click on it will usually be only a few pence because it is unlikely to be a competitive term (unless you have many distributors or retailers bidding on it).
However, we were recently approached by one of our Bristol internet marketing clients - Idhammar Systems. Idhammar the UK's leading providers of software for overall equipment effectiveness
(OEE) and computerised maintenance management software (CMMS). It had
another overall equipment effectiveness competitor bidding using its
trade name Idhammar. Was this legal?
There has been changes in recent months from Google and the regulations are different in US, UK and European countries. In the UK, anyone is allowed to bid on another person's trademark as a keyword, however they may not use the trademarked term in the text of the advert.
This last point is important for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Google will invariably charge the competitor a higher bid price and rank its advert lower because the "quality score" will be lower. The quality score is based on the consistency between:
- keyword being bid on
- text in the advert
- website page that the advert is pointing to
A well-designed PPC advert should have the keyword in all three (so that the searcher sees consistency and the reason why Google will give it a high quality score). However, it is impossible for the competitor's advert to have a high quality score because the keyword cannot be used in the advert and is unlikely to be used on website page that it is pointing to.
From the point of view of the Google searcher, if they are searching for your brand they are unlikely to click on your competitors advert. Unless of course they cannot find a link to your website either on the left hand organic listings or a PPC advert.
Should you find that your competitor is using an advert with your tradename in it, contact WSI and we will raise a case on your behalf with Google.