The use of other companies’ trademarks in your Adwords campaigns is something that crops up from time to time. After a recent judgement by Niilo Jääskinen, the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice,  it appears that the rules of the game are about to change (probably in the Summer of 2011).

What can we do in Adwords?

Currently you’re able to use someone else’s trademark as a keyword (or phrase) to trigger an ad. You are not allowed to use their trademark in the body of your ad. This seems to be sensible. You can advertise your alternative against a competitor or the market leader but you can’t mention them in the ad.

So, an ad triggered by the phrase “best hoover” can display an ad containing words to the effect “Our vacuum cleaners don’t clog up. Buy a Dyson”. In addition you can not show their URL at the bottom of the ad. I can’t think of a situation where the average user ,or indeed a “moron in a hurry“, can be confused by ads adhering to the current Adwords policy (please respond below if you disagree).

Are there implications for Google’s system?

By default the Adwords system is designed to match ads with keywords in a broad way. Ads will display against keywords and phrases that the system believes hold similar meaning. So, even when an advertiser adheres to a new law, they could potentially display an ad against a competitor’s trademark without specifically targeting that term. The following grab from the Google Keyword research tool seems to add weight to the idea that this is the case.

I wonder whether, since in its current form the use of the trademark is ‘behind the scenes’ and never seen by the user, Google’s use of trademarks in a database record somewhere to suggest that ‘ford’ is ‘similar to ‘vw’ against the likely trademark ruling? If so, this is surely absurd. Perhaps we’ll all have to add our competitors as negative keywords just to be on the safe side?

Is online so different from the real world?

The argument that I hear is that it’s not right for a business to profit from another’s trademark. Fair enough. How different is this from the scenario in the high street when Marks and Spencer opens a new shop? Other traders know that M&S will attract footfall in the same way that terms attract search traffic on Google. If the neighbouring traders can provide a compelling offer, they may be able to win some of that business that was M&S bound. No one’s been misled and I see nothing wrong. Surely, clearly written ‘competitive’ Adwords ads aren’t too different from that.

Photo credit: Tom Wardill

The only small comment I would make is that I believe the price paid is actually 1p (or $0.01 in the US) higher than the bid that’s been beaten rather than exactly the beaten bid price as Hal says. See more detailed info on the Google Help page about what you pay on Adwords.

Specifically, when we look at the relationship between Facebook users and total UK population. Is it really possible for 117% of women between 19 and 24 to have an account?

Clearly not, so why the dodgy figures? Here are my top guesses:

• UK population figures are impossible to get right
• People are lying about their age (younger people saying they’re over 13 to get an account and older people pretending they’re younger)
• Foreign students skew the figures
• People have more than one account
• Of course, Facebook could be inflating their reach figures when reporting to their advertisers but that wouldn’t be cricket would it!

I’m sure its a mixture of all of these guesses but the last one is worrying if we’re basing online advertising decisions on the figures Facebook are publishing.

You can get all the figures in a handy pdf from my UK web usage statistics page.

There can be a couple of reasons for the Lost IS due to rank; one of which is that the ads are being displayed on a partner site that doesn’t display as many ads as Google’s homepage so effectively the ad drops off the bottom. This is logical.

However, in the above example the advertiser is only distributing their ads on the Google search results page, so it will never be displayed anywhere other than on the Google.com/.fr/co.uk/com.au etc.

A second (and more relevant) reason for the Lost IS (Rank) is that the advertiser is missing opportunities to display ads against long tail terms. Let’s assume that the advertiser above is targeting the term “curly wigs” (phrase match type). They’ve set their CPC bid and daily budget high enough to display an ad to 100% of the people searching for “curly wigs”. But only 93% of the people searching for “curly wigs” plus a modifier e.g. “brown curly wigs” see an ad. This probably means that their website isn’t optimised for all the possible long tail terms (“curly wigs that make me look like Michael Knight just when he gets out of Kitt” anyone?).

The more content they add to their site, the more keywords they target and the more they bid the lower their Lost IS (Rank) will be. But at over 90% I reckon they’ve got the curly wig market pretty well covered!

Image: Glenn Pebley