Protecting Your Trademark in Paid Search Advertising

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Search engines appear to be moving towards a universal policy regarding competitive advertising. Currently, Yahoo and MSN state clearly that advertisers are not allowed advertise or bid on trademarked terms. Google still allows advertisers to bid on trademarked search terms, however will not allow that trademarked term to be used within a competing advertisers copy.

While it is important for advertisers to know the policies regarding competitive advertising, it is perhaps more important to make sure you are taking the appropriate steps to protect your trademark from these violations. To help protect your trademark, it is a good idea to conduct search audits on your trademarked terms every few weeks. Be sure that you are checking both the organic and paid listings, and report any violations immediately to the appropriate search engine using screen shots to document your findings.
Below are links to the Google, Yahoo and MSN editorial guidelines that contain all Trademark policy information:


Google AdWords Editorial Guidelines
Yahoo Search Marketing Trademark Guidelines

MSN adCenter Editorial Guidelines

Google AdWords Behavioral Targeting

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Well, sort of. Recently Google has started to tailor the delivery of its paid search advertisements, basing the delivery on not just the search query, but the previous query and sometimes even combinations of recent queries executed by the searcher. Google’s new approach to paid search ad delivery is detailed nicely in a blog post by Zachary Rodgers of ClickZ (link below).

Google has been quick to shoot down any notion that they are moving towards true behavioral targeting. Nick Fox, Google’s group business product manager for ads quality states, "We're not doing things like trying to profile the user to find out if the user is a man or a woman or a 45-year-old or a 25-year-old," he said. "In the context of search it doesn't seem that powerful, and we haven't seen any evidence that it will be that powerful."

While online behavioral targeting carries heavy privacy issues, I would disagree with Fox in that I can easily see how behavioral targeting can immensely help paid search advertisers. All marketers have a strong idea of who is in their target audience; wouldn’t paid search campaign ad servings be a lot better off if advertisers knew exactly what audience demographics their impressions were reaching? On the other hand, is capturing this kind of detailed information on searchers an excessive violation of privacy rights?

So let’s hear your opinion. Who out there would like to see stronger behavioral targeting techniques for paid search ad placements?