Competitor keywords, no longer fair game?

It may soon become a criminal offence to bid on a competitor’s registered trademark to advertise your products or services through Google AdWords and other PPC advertising solutions. Google have already clamped down on the use of competitors trademarks within ad copy but this could soon be taken a step further to give additional protection to branded terms and potentially eliminate bidding on competitor keywords altogether.

Numerous national European cases have been passed to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) as they work to ascertain whether the bidding on competitors trademarks should be classed as infringement upon them.

The adwords bidding system has historically been (and still is) ungoverned, meaning a company is free to use another company’s trademarks in order to attract people who may be searching for a rival brand.

While it will be some time before the ECJ makes its judgement, the Advocate General is expected to reveal his feelings on this issue in the near future. In most cases, the views of the Advocate General are borne out in the ruling of the ECJ, so his opinion carries a great deal of weight. Regardless of the eventual decision, now is a crucial time for a large number of businesses. Some will be looking to exploit this system before it’s too late, others will be looking to clean up their act in case the ECJ decides it is unlawful.

Exploitation and Damage Limitation

If the ECJ decides that bidding on registered trademarks within AdWords is illegal, those companies whose trademarks are being used without their permission will have some interesting opportunities for recompense:

• They can issue legal proceedings to get an injunction
• They can sue for damages
• They can demand an account of their competitor’s profits attributable to the trademark infringement

They can also recover any legal costs for the above. Clearly, while each of these presents a significant financial benefit, the biggest advantage will be the prospect of holding a nailed on legal claim against a competitor. As a business, that gives you a great deal of leverage!

Once a decision is reached – and the industry has no idea which way the decision will go – evidence will likely disappear very quickly as competitors cease bidding on competitors’ trademarked terms (see below for details) or even through google and other facilitators covering their tracks. Because of this, now is a good time to gather evidence should the opportunity arise when googling your own brand names and trademarks. Screenshots of google results pages and where they click though to may prove useful down the road, although this in unlikely to be enough on its own.

Risk and Mitigation

If you don’t bid on competitor keywords (or trademarks) in this manner, you’ve nothing to worry about and for the coming weeks this might be a good policy to adopt.  It may be worth making sure you have registered your own, to ensure that your competitor cannot. Equally, it’s a good idea to exercise some vigilance and check that nobody in your business has done so – even unintentionally. Ignorance is unlikely to be an excuse.

Protect your own brand

If you are bidding on a competitor’s trademark to help promote your own business, the time may be fast approaching when you need to make sure that the other company doesn’t find out. The easiest way to ensure this is to suspend your AdWord account: google states that once you action this process, all adwords will stop within the hour. This link will take you to a page that gives instructions on how to do this:

Close your google adwords account

It may then be advisable to open a new account for the purposes of re-establishing links to your own trademarks and key words even at a cost to your quality score. On the other hand, if the ECJ rules that this practice is actually lawful, you can simply reinstate your original account. After all – it’s better to lose some revenue from AdWords than it is to face a lawsuit and the resulting payout. Now might be a good time to review the revenue generated though bidding on a competitors brand terms if you have not done this for some time, it’s not really the time to be taking a punt on a not-so-profitable search engine estate branding exercise.

PPC stop and think

Getting the most out of pay per click advertising in the B2B realm

B2B environments are far more complex, both on and offline than other advertising environments, and this complexity carries over to online advertising. Generally, the B2B environment has a longer sales cycle as well as a convoluted purchasing process; one that is typically done in a manner which means that the decision to buy often does not lie with an individual who may be exposed to your advert while searching, but any number of people (who many have never seen your advert or even of heard of you). The actual purchasing process within larger organisations, no matter how modern and streamlined, rarely lend themselves to a paperless checkout/purchasing process. This is something that we will be revisiting here in the coming weeks.




A B2B PPC campaign could see a huge amount of clicks on a given keyword; and in fact, these clicks may even convert to sales. However, as we know, clicks and conversions alone do not make the process profitable – in retrospect they could make for a huge expense.

In order to profit through PPC advertising, you will have to develop and implement a model specific to your company from the very start. And depending on your exact business model, it is important to tailor the campaign towards predefined, concise goals that sit alongside and complement the overall model.

Knowing the acceptable price per acquisition is often the best starting point, and drilling down to acquisition by specific channel can provide you with even further insight. B2B models often assert a fairly high cost per acquisition after giving consideration to the customer lifecycle. But with a pay per click campaign this acquisition can be polluted by individuals (c’s rather than b’s) who have little or no long term profitability, and this can really skew such findings.

Defining the goals and developing the model is, of course, highly dependent upon the (range of) product both for sale and promoted within the campaign –some products that really do

Business to business PPC

make things easier for marketers. For example, a supplier of clocking-in equipment is not likely to attract a huge amount of interest from individuals, and therefore marketers and advertisers will not need to worry about shielding the campaign from unprofitable consumers as much as a supplier of wholesale storage bins would. Worst case scenario means that all of your keywords around the words “storage” and “bins” could attract an influx of traffic from consumers wanting household bins.

Keyword tools and tools that try to identify the quantity of traffic generated by specific search terms have their place in the development of an adwords campaign as well; but there effectiveness is limited. There is no way these tools can recognise or account for the true value of a keyword to your business; and this one thing that forms the foundation of a successful paid search campaign. To a keyword tool traffic is traffic, all of equal value.

The root of the problem

The problem stems partially from adwords’ inability to specifically target businesses in the same way an offline mailing would. Because you cannot decide who clicks your ads when running an adwords campaign online, you will likely experience a high number of inappropriate clicks on an ad that fail to convert – and this can be costly especially where small business and startups are concerned.

With PPC, marketers cannot even filter out ‘bad clicks’ by functioning as trade only as a bad click would need to be made in the first place just to reach a page providing this information – and of course by that time it is already too late. Of course with offline mailing you can target companies and even consumers much more directly; but in today’s information age, who wants to spend the time and money associated with printing out materials and mailing them all over the country?

There is no quick fix for the above problem; however, there are several best practice guides in existence which aim to streamline your PPC campaign within the B2B realm. The problem with these guides, however, is that (perhaps in an attempt to appeal to a larger audience) they are quite general and apply the standard rules of PPC advertising.

The guides referred to above may be ideal for those who are just learning the basics of PPC and trying to apply it to a B2B world, however, anyone who wants to profit from a successful online campaign­­ will need significantly more insight. Guides focusing on ad copy, budgeting, the long tail and negative keywords, all of which are vital to a successful campaign are not enough on their own. How many times can you repackage googles adwords guidelines and call it good advice? A local council would need a different ppc campaign to a sole trader who in turn would need things handled differently to a video production company – each requires a very unique approach.

In the coming weeks we will explore some techniques that can be applied to a B2B PPC campaign on an account, technical and business level to enhance what you have already and lay the foundations for success in the future. We will also look at the legal issues which surround PPC advertising when competitor keywords and trademarks are involved Subscribe to the RSS to be alerted when the post is live.