Help!!! Bidding on trademarks - good or bad?!!!

[RobBothan]

Ok so previous to me joining my company the PPC firm we pay has been bidding on our trademark, which roughly 60% of customers search for. Therefore the ROI has been crazy, 2000% and above. Due to SEO we are ranked no1 on search engines when they search for our trademark.
Now I told the PPC agency to get google to stop others bidding on our trademark. this has worked.
Next I told them to stop bidding on our trademark as without adverts on the search listings people will easily click on our no1 listing.
This worked over the weekend, no loss of visits or profits (just people swapped from entering thru PPC and went natural) :D

Now the Agency has stopped our bidding on the generic terms for our field because "we base our campaigns on the ROI" and they didnt want to lose out on "ROI" :confused:

As fas as i've known you base ROI alongside common sense, is it just me or are they daft?! theyre an agency and thus should be "experts" however in my 3yrs i've never based an entire campaign on that. bit of a mix
HELP!
any ideas? do we bid on our trademarks? or if we're no1 is it not neccesary to bid on natural search listings? :confused:

[caugas]

IMO.

Bid on trademark (cost should be low, like a few cents a click).
Rank 1st for Natural Listings
The combination Paid and Nat conifrms your domanice in the field or niche
and reasures your deadication in online advertising.

Ok, so you spend like and extra couple hundred a month in trademark cost, but its only a couple of hundred, from a branding perspective its worth itl


Now your agency is happy.
Now your team is happy, because the roi looks a little better.
Just break up your reporting into two buckets, trademark words vs. non-trademark terms, your AGENCY can help you.

lastly, tell your agency to write Google, Yahoo, MSN and let them know that you are restricitng affiliates and other third parties/compt from bidding on your trademarks, this will significANTLY lower your overall trademark cost.

[RobBothan]

thanks for the prompt reply caugas,
yeah i've been reading up on it and most seem to say bid on the trademark, from what your sayin i'd have to agree, so have now gotten onto agency to act on trademark and company name, was just worried that we were wasting money due to the large % of our customers searching for our brand anyway. guess if we minimize bids and protect them then should be ok!
:D

[caugas]

Anyone can always agrue don't bid on your trademarks. However if you are a strong brand you want to protect your trademarks. This is done two ways.

1. Producing your own trademarked ad's (low cost)
2. Limiting your affilaites, competetiors &r search aribitages sites permission or cause to tarnish your trademarks. By resticting permissions in the tier 1 engines via proof of trademarked patients.

I work for a direct marketer, and I do bid on trademarks.
However, I have trained everyone to understand the 10/1 or 12/1 ROI I recieve on a monthly basis is skued because it incorporates trademarked terms sales. They understand the limitations of my prospecting keywords.

Does this makes sense? Because when I first reported my 12/1 they wanted to give me millions of dollars to spend and asked me to bring a 5/1 ROI back. I told them that this was impossible because there were only a certain percentage of sales dollars I could squeeze out from trademark terms.

I then broke down the reporting showing that my prpspecting keywords only drove a 2.3/1 -3/1 ROI and they better understood the predictament I was in.

Does this make sense?

[AussieWebmaster]

You are not going to have every organic listing for your trademark.... also you are not going to be able to stop smart people from advertsing for your trademark in PPC either.... so sow up all chances you have.

There are studies that show if you have the ppc and organic you increase both CTRs....

[AussieWebmaster]

Also if I was your agnecy and you took away the commssions for the low lying fruit... I would want a higher return and the other words or be dialling back my efforts for you.

[caugas]

You are not going to have every organic listing for your trademark.... also you are not going to be able to stop smart people from advertsing for your trademark in PPC either.... so sow up all chances you have.

There are studies that show if you have the ppc and organic you increase both CTRs....

Good Points! :D

[Gooner151078]

Hi,

The benefits of bidding on your trademark are:

1. You have a lot better control over the title and description of your ad.
2. Your ads take a greater % share of SERP1, possibly ot the detriment of a competitor.
3. As stated above, there are a number of studies indicating a halo effect from the dual listing.

However,

If 65% of customers are accessing your site through your brand term then even at min.cpc's that is a lot of budget that you don't need to be spending.

If you have done studies to compare the visitor numbers with and without bidding on brand terms then use these to understand the traffic. If removing the paid listing has no impact on traffic, then why pay? These are customers looking to find you. Imagine a bricks and mortar retailer, every time a customer that walks into their shop.

Of course, there are some terms such as misspellings that cannot be protected. These should be segragated in terms of reporting.

There are also numerous ways for competitors to get round the system and bid on your mark - it's not really in Google's interests to spend time developing stringent protection algorithms. I have found that a simple phone call and gentlemans agreement between competitors has been enough to remove offenders. Google is the only winner from trademark wars.

Regarding not bidding on generics, how are your agency reporting on sales? Remeber that a generic click whilst possibly not the final click is a crucual driver to achieving a sale.

[AussieWebmaster]

Are you the only one in the organic results... I doubt that... so every link you add increases your percentage of possible ways to leave the page....

[caugas]

if you disallow affilaites, partners, competeitors, the right to dispaly your trademark terms in the copy and the display urls you will find that you cpc for trademark terms are extremly low, to aussies point its totally justified spending money for sales stemming from tmk terms you just need to report accurately to managment and make them understand the differnce between tmk sales and prospecting keywords. Its worth money to keep your brand untarneshed and to display and accurate marketing message. Not to mention the halo effect.. its a win win IMO.

[RobBothan]

Thanks everyone for the opinions, really helped me out, in the end i've kept the brand bidding on and have gotten onto the SE's to protect our trademark.
Cheers
RobBothan :D

[Toure]

Now the Agency has stopped our bidding on the generic terms for our field because "we base our campaigns on the ROI" and they didnt want to lose out on "ROI"

Sounds like your agency has been working out the validity and success of their campaign from your own brand and letting the high return from this compensate for more spend - which offers cr@p return.

Thats not what a decent agency does.

With regards to trademarking - Definitely trademark. I would argue there is no need for a big brand at the top of natural listings to also run an ad personally. But then again, studies have shown CTR's increase further for both with an ad (as AussieWebmaster says) and the cpc would be veeery low.

If they are going to bid on brand, get them to seperate return and reporting on brand Vs non branded campaigns. That will give you an idea of how great the campaign is.

[shilly]

If you search your brand name and your competitors are bidding on your name, you would be crazy not to bid on it yourself even if you are #1 naturally.

You will own more of the page. Why increase the chances of losing those customers to your competition?

Just make sure you fill out the proper search engine forms to let them know your name is trademarked. This may not prevent your competitors from bidding on your name, but it will prevent them from using your name in their adtext.

Google Form
http://www.google.com/tm_complaint_adwords.html

Yahoo
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/legal/trademarks.php

MSN
http://help.live.com/Help.aspx?market=en-US&project=WL_Searchv1&querytype=topic&query=WL_SEARCH_PROC_SubmitTrademarkConcern.htm

[Toure]

With regards to trademarking - Definitely trademark. I would argue there is no need for a big brand at the top of natural listings to also run an ad personally. But then again, studies have shown CTR's increase further for both with an ad (as AussieWebmaster says) and the cpc would be veeery low.

To clarify - I meant there is no need to bid against brand if the trademark is approved and you are top naturally in my opinion.

If you have adverts appearing against your brand currently, then definitely run an advert.

[AussieWebmaster]

To clarify - I meant there is no need to bid against brand if the trademark is approved and you are top naturally in my opinion.

If you have adverts appearing against your brand currently, then definitely run an advert.

Sorry I have to disagree.... even if no one else is appearing for your brand in PPC... it is doubtful you own every organic listing... the ppc ad gives you an additional spot which is at the top... again if previously you had top 2 listings that would be 20% of placement... add the ppc ad and now you have 3 of 11...

[Toure]

Sorry I have to disagree.... even if no one else is appearing for your brand in PPC... it is doubtful you own every organic listing... the ppc ad gives you an additional spot which is at the top... again if previously you had top 2 listings that would be 20% of placement... add the ppc ad and now you have 3 of 11...

I 'kind of' agree with you in some senses.. but I am reluctant to believe that *most* people are so lazy that they will not run another quick search if the said brand does not immediately appear.

There is another medium which I use for a number of clients - Run a broad match against the brand and then exact negative match out those specifics where they appear top organically.

Check your referral logs and see the exact search term which was used and either add / negative match from there.

[AussieWebmaster]

Studies show the lift in branding and CTR for the PPC when both listings are present.

[RobBothan]

I have seen studies mentioned where the rise in CTR when both the SERP is no1 and there is PPC visible, and understand why it makes sense - you can believe the company is established enough to own both no1 on the company name you searched for and also have "muscle" for advertising.
Also there is the added benefit of being able to change your PPC ad copy to suit circumstances (sale, special offer, membership info etc) that you may not want in your site description.
However it does annoy me as when i browse i rarely go to the PPC ad when i can see the natural search listing at no1. thus i suppose the tight fisted person in me is annoyed at "wasting" money on those people who click on the advert when they can see our natural search listing!
v.interesting how this is something many people are discussing, thus can't see MSN and Yahoo holding their positions on trademarks for too much longer.
thanks everyone!
Rob

[egain]

I 'kind of' agree with you in some senses.. but I am reluctant to believe that *most* people are so lazy that they will not run another quick search if the said brand does not immediately appear.

There is another medium which I use for a number of clients - Run a broad match against the brand and then exact negative match out those specifics where they appear top organically.

Check your referral logs and see the exact search term which was used and either add / negative match from there.

Have to totally agree with AussieWebMaster.. users dont need a reason not to use your services - and users are generally lazy - so the less you make them work -the more chance you have of getting that client.

If I type in E-gain and e-gain doesnt appear anywhere, I am not going to go back and type in e-gain uk , e-gain etc, I will go elsewhere unless you ahve such a dominant market position - which most of us here will have a limited number of.

[Toure]

If I type in E-gain and e-gain doesnt appear anywhere, I am not going to go back and type in e-gain uk , e-gain etc, I will go elsewhere unless you ahve such a dominant market position - which most of us here will have a limited number of.

Thats because your lazy. ;)

Its REALLY dependant on the circumstance. If you typed in E-gain and nothing relevant came up either naturally or paid, I bet you would search again.

Perhaps if you were to search for the E-gain and relevant alternatives either organically or paid appeared, you might look elsewhere. It depends on brand strength and those in competition.

But as I said - If adverts are appearing against your brand, run an advert definitely.

If there are no adverts and you appear top organically then in my opinion its not necessary. You can use the broad match with negative exact match if your worried about misstypes or lazy searchers.

If budget is not a problem - Then fine, bid on brand and use the increase in CTR both organic and paid receive. Although some agencies love this as it allows them to mix typically high brand performance with poor campaign performance elsewhere.

[egain]

Thats because your lazy. ;)

Dont hold back please ... Dont worry no offence taken (and ps to others - im not lazy :))

[RobBothan]

If budget is not a problem - Then fine, bid on brand and use the increase in CTR both organic and paid receive. Although some agencies love this as it allows them to mix typically high brand performance with poor campaign performance elsewhere.
lol budget isnt a problem, however agency does love its ROI and thus was mixing our brand and "standard" keywords ROI's up. Thus when we paused the brand bidding as a test they stopped all our other keywords due to the ROI being lowered! since then i've had them seperate the brand from the generic.

[AussieWebmaster]

lol budget isnt a problem, however agency does love its ROI and thus was mixing our brand and "standard" keywords ROI's up. Thus when we paused the brand bidding as a test they stopped all our other keywords due to the ROI being lowered! since then i've had them seperate the brand from the generic.

and if you had factored just the organic from brand into that ROI would it have improved or dropped slightly as well?

[RobBothan]

and if you had factored just the organic from brand into that ROI would it have improved or dropped slightly as well?
eh? from i think your saying there (having long day and IQ dropping towards end :rolleyes: ) then i our roi is great with organic, when we stopped brand ppc there was no drop in overall visitors or sales.
rob
btw found an interesting thread to complement this on affiliates side of things:
http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=56001
interesting few comments there.
r

[Toure]

eh? from i think your saying there (having long day and IQ dropping towards end ) then i our roi is great with organic, when we stopped brand ppc there was no drop in overall visitors or sales.

So... if there was no drop in overall visitors or sales....why bid on brand.

;)

[caugas]

we are still talking about this issue............
The poll question is why bid on trademarks when it is protected by the Search Engines..............

1. The search engines don't always protect your trademark in all case.
I still have competitors that sneak an a trademarked term into the ad copy once in a blue moon

2. Even if your trademark is protected, other advertsiers can be displayed.
Are you will to talk the chance of cross advertising seapage? I am not!! :o

3. Conversion are better when your brand is enforced in both the paid and natrual listings.
4. Do I need to go on? :p

[AussieWebmaster]

Drop the ppc and see what happens to those numbers over the next six months. You are overlooking the impact of the long tail.

[seomagnet]

Why would you need to ask if bidding on your own trademark is bad?

Obviously, All major companies use their trademarks to generate traffic. The trademark itself should be what your brand is built upon or at least the dandy product that you have invented.

Now if you were asking about bidding on someone elses trademark, that would be a different story..

However, the way you are going about stopping the use of using your trademark by others could have negative affects if you are a company who offer partnerships or an affiliate program.

Anyway, Just my thoughts,
Chris

BTW: If you are only paying for bids on your trademark and you are not utilizing the full budget to place additional bids to drive even more traffic to your site, sounds to me like your company needs a new PPC Management Team.