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Late Thursday, Google announced the largest changes to their US AdWords policy in some time. Previously, trademark owners could prevent anyone from using their trademarks in their ad copy. Now, resellers and information sites may utilize the trademarked terms in their ad copy.
This shift will likely be a boon for shopping comparison sites, [...]
Google announced a change yesterday to its AdWords trademark policy in 190 countries, bringing that policy in line with its policies for the US, CA, UK & IE.
Trademark Bidders (New Countries that Google will now allow TradeMark Bidding in)
The full list of 190 countries affected can be found in Google’s announcement:
Countries like Japan, South Africa, [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in adwords, affiliate marketing, poaching
06 Apr
Amazon sent an email to all its affiliates this morning announcing a change in its paid search policy for affiliates – Affiliates will no longer be allowed to direct link to Amazon.
The issue of whether search affiliates add to the bottom line is a hotly debated one in affiliate marketing. In our opinion, the [...]
Those that have been following the various legal wranglings over search ads and trademarks recognize that a key issue is whether search ads classify as a ‘use in commerce’. This distinction is important for trademark holders – very few trademark protections apply unless the trademark is ‘used in commerce’. I’m surprised that there has ever [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in adwords, case law
11 Feb
SearchEngineLand wrote on a recent ruling by a French court that fined Google 350,000 Euros for allowing companies to bid on the trademarks of two companies.
Google maintains two policies for trademark use in AdWords: The policy in the US/UK/IE/CA and the policy used in the Rest of the World. Google’s policy in France allows [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in PPC, adwords
14 Jan
PPCHero has a great post that discusses why trademarked terms are allowed in display URLs:
Basically, a company can have a trademarked name as a real sub-domain on their site for site architecture purposes. Example, using the same Nike reference, if I own a website called shoesgalore.com, and I have a full page of [...]
We picked up these recent additions to several seasonal searches. This is a tradition that Google has been doing since 2005. We’ve found six already – let us know if you find any more.
Update:
This isn’t new. Barry Schwartz from SearchEngineLand first noticed this in August:
http://searchengineland.com/google-checkout-steps-up-promotion-through-adwords-14635.php
We did suddenly see a rash of these on Monday, so perhaps the program was expanded.
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Google has consistently been increasing the visual differentiation of the badges in AdWords and are testing new badges with coupons prominently displayed.
Here is a screenshot:
This is apparently a limited [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in PPC, PoachMark, adwords, ysm
01 Oct
Updated May 5:Google has made several changes in its trademark policies. Please visit our summary of Search Engine Trademark Policies for the current policies of the search engines.
We work with several of our clients to enforce their trademark rights on Yahoo, Google and Live and felt a summary of our experiences would be useful [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in adwords, affiliate marketing
18 Sep
Jeremy Shoemaker pointed out this thread on Digital Point where an affiliate manager requested access to an affiliate’s AdWords account.
The affiliate manager was trying to determine if the affiliate had violated the keyword policies of the merchant. Obviously, there is a lot of sensitive data in there and affiliates should be extremely reluctant to provide [...]