Google Update Trademark Policy
Google are today announcing to the press that they are updating their trademark policy on their popular Adwords program.
The change is being made to bring the UK in line with US advertising. The change will mean that advertisers are allowed to use registered trademarks as keywords within your account. Ad texts will still be monitored and advertisers won’t be allowed to use registered trademarks here, however from the 5th PPC advertisers will be allowed to advertise under registered trademarks. It is then down to advertisers to check the legalities of whether they want to advertise on registered trademarks or not.
Google have confirmed that this change is being made to give UK searches better choice when making a Google search. By allowing more advertisers to advertise on trademarked terms this will give the searcher far more choice of Pay per Click ads.
This change brings things into line with the US pay per click trademark regulation, however before 2004 we were on the same trademark regulations as the US.
Overall, I think it will be good for pay per click – it will make it very interesting as well. For those that manage listings on iPods, Seat, Epson etc we will all know how expensive and competitive the PPC can be. This change will make it more competitive but it will definitely help the user out to give them the best search results. Therefore, this can only be a benefit for PPC advertising. It is a downside for trademark owners because they don’t have the complete backing of Google to do everything in their power to stop resellers making the most of something that they don’t technically own.
However, these changes do come at an interesting time and does seem suspicious. There are a couple of fundamental reasons that it could be.
Is it Google covering their tracks from a legal perspective? Do they have fresh intelligence from one of their trademark claims being made against them? Does American Airlines spring to mind? When Google phoned to inform me of this news it was mentioned that we would need to check the validity of trademarks as keywords before
entering them into an accounts as from the 5th May 08 it would have nothing to do with them. Does this sound like they are scared of something? It sounds very much like they have learnt something from legal activities and have had to reconsider their stance of keyword activity.
Is it Google making the most of clicks at a time when click volumes through PPC are showing little growth? Recent reports point to just a 3% increase in PPC click-throughs Q1 08 compared to a year ago. By allowing more advertisers to advertise under registered trademarks how many more clicks will they be able to charge for,
and at what premium?!
Either way you look at it it is an intriguing change. More updates on this to follow.
