Why don't national brands have PPC ads that target their names, while smaller brands do?
-
Google's policy is to allow other businesses to run PPC ads against your business name, even when trademarked, so long as the ads don't include the trademarked name. At least that's what I have experienced and read online.
Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdWords/thread?tid=55e2b4bf90ae9585&hl=en
Why do so many national brands have no PPC ads showing on their names in Google searches?
- http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=best+buy
- http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=victorias+secret
- http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=office+depot
And so on.
Smaller brands, even when trademarked, are awash in competitors targeting their names:
- http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=nally+used+cars
- http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=la+jolla+cosmetic+surgery+centre
Consider these two hotels:
- http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=ritz+carlton+new+york
- http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=hotel+3030+new+york
There are two slightly different questions in play here, as I have clients I'd like to better protect against this type of PPC poaching:
- So, are there any different policies at Google Adwords RE: national brands and having competitor's ads show on their names?
- How do the major brands block the advertisers on their names?
Thanks!
-
Something I experienced when running an in-house ppc campaign for a smaller brand was that big companies aren't afraid to send out C&D letters from their very expensive lawyers if you bid on their branded terms (not using their name in the text). While there is certainly no law saying you can't bid on a branded term, a smaller brand is going to cave because they won't be taking on a giant in court.
-
The ads that rank best may appear at the top of the page. In the screenshot you've attached, the top result there with the orange background is an Office Depot ad. Branded searches rank very well, so you'll usually see that companies result up there at the top of the SERPs.
In my experience, bidding on competitors branded terms does not convert well. People are looking for that site, and not your site. My experience is not in e-commerce though; if you sell shoes, and you bid on "buy nikes", you're may be doing it right.
-
Excellent point.
-
Thank you for your good responses.
It is the last situation mentioned - why PPC advertisers are not targeting other national brands (Brand A paying to show on Brand B) that I was primarily asking about.
It may be that I am simply being filtered out by the PPC ads that are in the system for brand keywords (wisely, I might add, if that's the case). But I can reproduce these results using proxies, and I can reproduce them using different geographic locations. The brand pages are often much quieter than any small brand keyword search and my mentioned ones show almost devoid of competing ads.
If a brand were paying for top position, that hardly precludes other ads in the lower positions on the page.
Any other thoughts? Is the lack of competing PPC ads perhaps the result of lots of direct contact, asking other advertisers to lay off their trademark targeting?
Are you able to reproduce my national brand searches with PPC ads each time? Here's a screenshot. I see only one brand ad for each of my big brand examples:
http://markup.io/v/s46jhgayjdbn -
John nailed it.
The examples you shared where small companies searches show competitive ads are highly influenced by the search term. For the first three searches you used the company names "best buy", "victoria's secret" and "office depot". The other searches you used more generic terms which naturally trigger ads. "Nelly Used Cars" is showing ads, but "Nelly" isn't the trigger. "Used Cars" is the trigger. Try the search again for just "Nelly", then try another search for "Used Cars". The ads have nothing to do with "Nelly". The same feedback applies to "La Jolla Cosmetic Surgery Center".
-
I believe you are asking why 'BIG BRAND A' doesn't have competitors bidding for 'BIG BRAND A' related search terms -- vs why 'BIG BRAND A' doesn't bid on their own brand name. On first read I thought it was the latter, but now I see your intent (correct me if I'm wrong).
For the latter, big brands are in paid search for their own brand queries all the time. The examples you showed even have it. The cost is so low, and there are some added brand positioning arguments.
The trickier question is with competitors bidding on other competitors brand terms. e.g. Fredrick's of Hollywood bidding on 'Victoria's Secret' etc. I think some of the other responses addressed this.
-
Just opinion here...
Big brands are often arrogant and presumptuous that you will look for their website before clicking - and they are often correct with that thinking.
The little guy often must stand on a chair, waive his hands, jump up and down while shouting to get the consumer's attention away from the big brand.
... and most importantly... these aggressive little guys are often very smart.
(this post is written assuming that the little guy is advertising his own brand name and NOT the brand name of the big competitor)
-
First, in answer to your questions:
- There are no different policies other than what you stated above. You can not use a companies trademarked name in ad text, but you can use their names in keywords.
- They don't block them. By entering the auction, they'll drive up the price for their competitors. Since their quality scores are higher, they'll win the auctions with cheaper bids.
If your sales are pretty steady, you can run a test to see if running a branded campaign bidding on your own name is worthwhile. Your organic traffic will go down a bit, but since people are looking for your company, your keyword quality scores will be very high, and you should be winning the auctions with relatively cheap bids. If anyone else is bidding on your brand keywords, it's almost always a good idea for you to be in there as well. Otherwise, it's worth testing to see if it has a positive ROI.
Your examples are a bit flawed... a query like "Nallys used cars" is going to trigger for all broad and phrase keywords targeting "used cars", which many companies are going to target. Also "la jolla cosmetic surgery centre" has "cosmetic surgery" which lots of people are bidding on.
Also, I saw ads for all of your examples above which you didn't see ads for (Best Buy, Victoria's Secret, and Office Depot).
-
Hi Cake --
Google's AdWords trademark policy is pretty extensive, and is summarized here: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=16316. The policies apply regardless of business size.
As someone who has had the conversation many times with clients, I can tell you that whether or not a company bids on their own brand terms is an ongoing debate. The "PPC poaching" that you point out is the very reason that I almost always recommend setting up a brand campaign in PPC, but some clients refuse to "pay" for clicks on their brand terms when they have such a strong organic presence. My view? It's a very, very inexpensive way to ensure that you at least have the top paid spot on searches for your own brand name.
Bottom line: If you don't see a PPC ad on a business' brand name, it's either (1) ignorance, or (2) them not wanting to pay super cheap CPC's for brand protection.
Hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved Google Ads - Subdomain on Sitelinks & Composition Change for Strategy Status
I have a basic query but could not find a definite answer on the internet. I am currently running a campaign for the main website of a big education brand and they also have a secondary learning website on subdomain, and I want to add sitelinks of subdomain to the campaign, but I am not sure whether it is allowed or not. The brand I am running ads for is https://www.rauias.com/ and the secondary website is https://compass.rauias.com/ branded slightly different in a subdomain, so should I add the sitelinks of Compass to the main campaign? Also one more silly question My Max Conversion search campaign gave me this status today. "Learning (composition change): Campaigns have been added to or removed from the bid strategy. Google Ads is now adjusting to optimize bids. 5 days left for learning" What does this mean exactly? And Why does it reenter the learning phase whenever I make a small change?
Paid Search Marketing | | rauoff0 -
Yellow Pages advertising and ad sources
From experience I've always been telling clients of mine to stay from Yellow Pages advertising. It has been several years now and it seems that Yellow Pages not only offers just priority listings but also SEO and their own version of Adwords it seems. I received a call from a Yellow Pages sales rep today saying they can promise me 50k impression views for $500/month which is a campaign managed by them and they'll even create the ads as well. When I questioned them on their 9 million sources they have for generating these impressions, if these impressions are local or national they mentioned it works like Adsense in a way. I eventually declined their offer and figured I'd do some research. If I were to create an Adwords Display campaign with that kinda of budget and do it locally by my city, Adwords forecasts are no where near that kind of impression count, expanding the campaign out to all of Ontario would be closer but still not quite that high an impression count. I'm assuming YP doesn't have as large of a network compared to Google either which also makes me more doubtful. What I would really like to know is has anyone had any success with YP advertising compared to Adwords recently especially with their high costs for such services? And does anyone know where exactly YP, Google Adwords, Bing Ads get their web partners and sources from? I know there are ad revenue agencies like Metroland that sell their ad sources to such companies and was curious.
Paid Search Marketing | | FPK0 -
Put AdWords mobile ads in separate Campaign or AdGroup?
We want to ramp up traffic from the segment "Mobile with Full Browser" under enhanced campaigns in Google AdWords. Our Google rep said that it would be best to do this from within the same campaign. We're contemplating pulling the mobile traffic conversion effort out into its own campaign in order to more easily track performance. Background: We bid down traffic from "Mobile with Full Browser" to -100% because initially it performed poorly. We've improved our mobile experience and we want to try again. We're contemplating building mobile versions of our current ads using the AdWords functionality that does this, and watching how the mobile ads and the segment "Mobile with Full Browser" responds this time. Separate campaign or from within the same campaign. What would you do? Thanks,
Paid Search Marketing | | mbiskup0 -
Adding nyc to a keyword in Google Adwords
Hello. If I have a keyword in Google Adwords that is using phrase match ("keyword"), could it be useful to add the keyword phrase "keyword nyc"? Even if I did not add the second keyword phrase, my ad would be triggered if someone searched for "keyword nyc." So would it be redundant to add the second keyword phrase? Thank you!
Paid Search Marketing | | nyc-seo0 -
Multiple keyword match types - same ad group, or separate ad groups?
Hi guys, Looking at an account that has historically used broad matching, and i'd now like to take some of the better performing keywords and duplicate as phrase and/or exact match to increase the quality of traffic to the landing pages. I know I can add red shoes, "red shoes" and [red shoes] to the same ad group, however I've also read that people are creating separate groups for each match type. Other than easy of management (same group), or more granular targeting of ads (separate groups), should I go with either approach, or a blend of the two? My key objective in this restructure is to drop the currently high bounce rate on the landing pages by improving the relevance of the incoming traffic. Cheers, Jez
Paid Search Marketing | | jez0000 -
Recommend a PPC book
Hello everyone, I recently read Danny Doves book, Search engine optimisation secrets, and loved it. I was wondering if anyone had read a similar book on the PPC side which they could recommend that touches on similar topics such as advanced techniques but also the practical side such as billing and dealing with customers etc...
Paid Search Marketing | | RikkiD220 -
Tagging Bing PPC
I am trying to tag my bing cpc in GA using the URL builder tool: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578 It is incredibly tedious, and in order to get to the level of adwords, I have to create a unique URL for each keyword! Ahh, please tell me there is a better way!
Paid Search Marketing | | QuickLearnTraining0 -
SEO for PPC landing pages
After completing several months of on-page SEO for my site (one keyphrase per URL) and getting an "A" from SEOmoz on each page, now I'm venturing into PPC AdWords for the first time. From what I've read you pretty much want one landing page per keyword/ad. So if I want to target 100 PPC keywords I need 100 landing pages. And each landing page needs to be SEO'd as if you were doing it for organic search purposes so that your ad has a chance at a high Quality Score (8 to 10). I realize that an ad's QS is 2/3rds driven by its CTR but in the beginning when the ad is new the initial QS assigned seems to be driven more by landing page relevancy and some historical attributes of the AdWords account in which the ad or Campaign is located. My question is: What, if anything, do you do different on a page designed to be a PPC landing page as compared to a regular page you would SEO for organic search benefits? Also, should you do any of the off-page things (external links with relevant anchor text) for PPC landing pages? I'm envisioning landing pages that only exist to receive PPC ad clicks and that will not be linked to from my site directly. Each landing page talks a bit about the keyword the user was searching on and then directs them to the most relevant page(s) within my site. Maybe that's flawed? Thanks for any tips...
Paid Search Marketing | | scanlin0