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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 [...]
Eric Goldman points to a recent ruling that declared purchasing an ad based on a keyword (a practice currently allowed by Google) to be a use in commerce.
Eric also points out that there has been split rulings on whether this constitutes a use in commerce:
The court is right about the majority vote, but it’s hardly [...]
While most lawsuits involving trademarks and search engine advertising identify the search companies as defendants, CNET recently covered a lawsuit between two competitors that sell identity theft protection services. Namesafe, sued Lifelock in the federal district court of Tennessee for trademark infringement and is seeking damages, attorney’s fees and an injunction against Lifelock.
The ads in [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in PPC, adwords
03 Jun
The WSJ published an article today about trademark ‘piggybacking’ in Google’s search advertising, and the growing resentment of the practice by Google’s advertisers. They use the term ‘piggybacking’ to refer to the use of:
major players’ brand names, slogans or other trademarked words in the text of search ads to lure Web surfers to their [...]
Stephen Heise (via SearchEngineLand) identifies some advertisers that are cloaking their AdWords URLs:
spammers create ads that display your URL but redirect to a spam site of their choosing, cloaking the redirect so Google can’t tell what’s going on.
This is actually a close relative of Referrer Laundering and uses many of the same techniques. In [...]
Search Engine Roundtable reports that some Adwords advertisers have begun to see Google enforcing their new display url policy. The report is based on a WebmasterWorld thread in which two advertisers report enforcement.
While this is encouraging, we haven’t seen this in any of the campaigns that we monitor. Google rarely makes sweeping changes, [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in ACPA, adwords, case law
24 Apr
Thomas O’Toole reviews a recent decision by the District Court in the Punch Clock v Smart Software Development case. The two websites in question (punchclock.com & punch-clock.com).
The case was won by default (the defendant didn’t appear). The defendant was found to have infringed the registered punchclock mark in violation of 15 U.S.C. 1114(1)(a) and had [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in adwords, affiliate marketing
07 Apr
Google recently announced that while it will jettison Performics search marketing division, it will keep the Performics affiliate network.
We’ve found it difficult to definitively distinguish merchant search marketing campaigns run by Performics from ads run by Performics affiliates so this move should clearly separate the two link structures over time.
Here’s the email from Performics to [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in PPC, adwords
04 Apr
On May 5, Google will allow trademark bidding in the UK and Ireland.
Internationally, Google has kept stricter policies regarding the bidding on trademarked terms. Typically Google doesn’t allow it.
Google’s change now brings their UK/Ireland trademark policies in line with their US policies. This quote from Google’s announcement is particularly notable:
We want advertisers [...]
On April 1st, Google will begin enforcing consistency between the landing page URL and the display URL.
Google has held this policy for a long time, but it has been loosely enforced. We’ve found plenty of ads where the display URL is never reached when a user is redirected to the final destination. [...]