I've been reading about the recent change in Google's trademark bidding strategy and it made me wonder. Will this change in the rules only affect people who have trademarked a search term, or will it push prices up across the board? In 1 months time, people will be able to start bidding against each other for trademarked keywords. For instance, coca-cola may start bidding for 'pepsi'. In fact, every man and his dog might start bidding for Pepsi, pointless as that may be.
One way of looking at it is that Coca-cola would be essentially burning money by advertising using this method. This is because people searching for Pepsi WANT Pepsi, so all Coca-cola has managed to do is frustrate the customer. On the other hand, the customer might click on the link and realise that Coca-cola has a special offer on, so they'll buy Coca-cola in future. In that case, was it worth it for coca-cola to pay £20 for pinching that 1 Pepsi customer? Added to that is the power of Pepsi being number 1 in the natural listings anyway.
And what about other Big Brands? Adidas could put a bid in for the keyword 'Nike', so that when people search for Nike trainers, up comes an advert for Adidas trainers. Hang on - that already happens. Why? Because Nike haven't 'trademarked' their brandname with Google. There wouldn't be any point because Nike allows its resellers to sell their brand over the internet, probably together with other sports brands.
And what about the resellers - are they likely to suffer? Lets take The Biz - they're selling a wide variety of surf brand clothing, and they might decide to bid on the keyword 'billabong t-shirts'. My first reaction to that would be MORE FOOL THEM. Even before Google changes it's rules, they'll be paying a fortune for such a vague keyword with very low conversions.
However, if they were to bid on 'mens red billabong t-shirt' (with a phrase or exact match), it's unlikely that Quicksilver will be bidding against that for a keyword so in that scenario, trademark bidding isn't going to make much difference to The Biz's Adwords spend. On top of that, if they take the searcher directly to a targeted landing page, the likelyhood of converting that click to a sale shoots up.
So the answer is this: As long as you're doing it right, Google's introduction of trademark bidding won't affect your adwords spend. We have just finished developing a product that ensures you do it right and takes the soul-destruction out of keyword targeting so that you can create specific keyword ad campaigns for every single one of your ecommerce products (whether you have 100 or 1 million products) that take people directly to a targeted landing page. In the click of a mouse. No laborious filling in of 200,000 fields required.
