What to Do If Your Competitors Purchase Your Brand Keyword

So you’re promoting your brand online through paid search?

I’m sure you’ve spent a significant amount of money attempting to generate more high-quality leads. The use of your brand’s keywords and the brand name has unquestionably proven to be the most cost-effective strategy.

Imagine waking up one morning, opening your laptop, and typing in your branded keyword, only to discover that the top listings are all ads purchased by your main competitor.

Worse, neither Google nor Bing has explicitly prohibited this conquest tactic.

Google removed the restrictions that prevented brands from bidding on a competitor’s branded keyword as of June 4, 2019.

The only condition left is that your competitors cannot use your trademarked brand name in their ad copy.

Starting June 4, marketers in about 200 countries will be allowed to purchase rival trademarks as keywords to trigger display of “sponsored search” ads on Google.
Honda, for instance, could bid to have one of its ads displayed when a consumer searches the term “Toyota.” In recent years some companies have sued Google or the competing company, saying the practice is a form of trademark infringement.
The decision to implement the strategy more widely suggests that Google is confident it is operating on sound legal footing.

This means you won’t be able to report your competitor to Google. No rule, no complaints. Using Google to solve such a problem has become more limited.

If this is acceptable in Google’s eyes, what is the solution?

One option is to go the Basecamp route:

Fortunately, there are a few other options available to you. Of course, you don’t want to lose potential customers just because they saw your competitor’s advertisement first.

Instead, there are four things you can do to turn a bad situation into a good one for your company.

Let’s get started.

1. Own Your Brand Name

Bidding on your own brand keywords may not always seem logical, but it’s a good way to protect your brand name and regain clicks lost when a competitor’s ads appear under your brand keywords.
In some cases, it takes another company purchasing your branded keywords to remind you that you should have bid on your brand name in the first place.

Because no one (including you) was bidding on your brand name, your competitor took advantage of the opportunity to pay a higher cost-per-click (CPC) to siphon valuable leads away from your company.

Another advantage of purchasing your own brand name is that you control the messaging. It allows you to create various types of ads that you can A/B test to see which are the most effective:

Should you include a call to action in your ad?
Should you include a coupon or a discount code?
Should you inform customers that you provide free two-day shipping?

When someone else purchases your brand, they are not interested in posting ads related to your business. Your USP is unique, regardless of how similar your businesses are.

So, just because someone has purchased your branded keyword doesn’t mean you have to use the same old copy.

Here’s one of my favorite examples:

In other words, even if a competitor is visible, it’s worth controlling the message in a way that accurately positions your business when prospects see that ad.
Aside from manually bidding, there are a few perhaps less well-known bid options that can be useful in these situations:

Share of Target Impression

Target impression share is an automated bidding strategy that will dynamically set your bids in order to increase the likelihood of your ads appearing in one of three areas of the search results pages:

On the results page, anywhere.
Page one of the results.
At the very top of the results page.

Google Ads will then set your bids automatically to help you meet that goal.

Simply navigate to Settings > Bidding > Change Bidding Strategy > Target Impression share.

The basic settings you’ll need to update are:

Where do you want your advertisements to appear: Which placement you choose will most likely be determined by your budget and/or how many leads/sales you are losing to your competitors. I would recommend putting the options to the test to see which one provides the best value for money.

Percentage (%) of impressions shared with the target: For brand terms, I believe that 100 percent should be the default input, but in any case, enter the percentage of auctions in which you want to outrank your competitor.

Max. bid limit: The maximum bid limit is the highest maximum CPC you are willing to pay. For some people, brand terms are priceless, so the sky is the limit. Others, despite their importance, must remain mindful of budget constraints. The most important thing to remember is that if your campaign’s budget is limited, the strategy may not be able to achieve this specific targeting goal.

We recommend waiting at least seven days before making changes to the strategy settings because the strategy can take up to seven days to begin producing results.

Otherwise, the “learning” will be reset and you will be back at the beginning of the learning process.

Read: Should Brands Still Invest In Offline Marketing: What Marketing Gurus Say.

2. Talk To The Business, File A Cease & Desist

Before you take any action, you should contact the competitor who purchased your brand keywords and requests that the ads be removed.

In your opinion, this is a waste of time because your competitor is unlikely to comply with that request.

That may be true, but you should always give the other company a chance to make things right so that when things get heated between you two in terms of competing ads, your conscience is clear because you tried to take the high road.

In some cases, your competition may be unaware that it has bid on your keywords, especially if it was done by an agency that did not disclose that it was using this tactic to boost search engine rankings.

In my personal experience, this simple request revealed that the competitor’s agency was purchasing these terms without their knowledge on multiple occasions. In other cases, ad serving occurred as a result of Google’s liberal keyword matching and/or a lack of negative keywords.

While we never give legal advice, if all diplomatic efforts fail, the threat of legal action can sometimes be enough to persuade your competitor to shift their budget elsewhere.

The next step is for your attorney to issue a cease and desist order.

3. File A Trademark Complaint With The Engines

This option is only viable if your brand name is registered as a trademark.

You can file a trademark infringement complaint to prevent all advertisers from using your brand keywords in their ad copy.

If you own the trademark, regardless of whether your brand is currently being conquered, this is probably a wise step to cut off most forms of Google Ads trademark abuse. To be clear, it will not prevent all infringements, but it should significantly reduce them.

Bing, on the other hand, is less certain about the trademark complaint’s longevity, but it’s still a wise move.

You can file a complaint with Google and Bing here and here, respectively.

How to File a Trademark Complaint

I’ve assisted in the submission of a number of these on behalf of my clients over the years. Here are a few pointers to help expedite the process:

Submit Complaints Using the Trademark Owner’s Email Address

While many clients defer to their agencies to submit these, I’ve discovered that submitting these complaints with the trademark owner’s email address eliminates some of the verification follow-ups required to process the claim.

First, gather all supporting documentation.

Gather the necessary documentation before beginning the process. Depending on the size of the company, it may take some time to gather all of the necessary information.

This includes the following:

The complete list of trademarked terms/phrases.
Number of trademark registrations and country of registration
The name of the trademark holder.
Your ad account identifier and name.
Screenshots of the infringing advertisement (s).
A list of all websites that may use your trademark (if any).
Your Bing/Google account manager (or that of your company).

In terms of account managers, if you have a dedicated account manager, make sure to include them in the process. They should be able to help push the request through on their end, potentially speeding up the process.

4. Place a bid on your competitor’s brand keywords

If none of the aforementioned actions work, you can always begin bidding on their brand keywords. When you bid on another brand, your CPC will be higher, but there may be some benefits that outweigh the costs.

Before you bid, look into how much traffic your competitors are generating based on the branded terms they are using.

Semrush, Spyfu, and other similar tools are excellent for this. They are simple to learn and use. You’ll get the most accurate information about the keywords to bid on and the amount of traffic to expect.

By focusing on the competitor who purchased your brand, you may be able to raise their CPCs, take some of their lead volumes, and potentially force them to stop bidding on your brand name, which is a good thing.

Remember that you can’t use a competitor’s trademarked name in any of your ad copy, so be clever and creative when creating your ads.

Tip: If you put in this effort, you’ll almost certainly get smacked with low-quality scores (translated as relevance between keywords + ad copy + landing page). This makes sense because listing your competitor’s name on your own website would be an outlier.

It is also illegal to use trademarked terms in the ad copy. According to Google’s algorithm, this results in very low relevance and very high CPCs compared to your account average. This may make it impossible to continue in the long run.

A comparison table or chart on your landing page is a strategy we’ve found to work well in the past to improve at least the keyword + landing page relationship.

One of my favorites is the example below from Monday.com, which uses third-party inputs to demonstrate the benefits.

Remember that you can’t use a competitor’s trademarked name in any of your ad copy, so be clever and creative when creating your ads.

Tip: If you put in this effort, you’ll almost certainly get smacked with low-quality scores (translated as relevance between keywords + ad copy + landing page). This makes sense because listing your competitor’s name on your own website would be an outlier.

A comparison table or chart on your landing page is a strategy we’ve found to work well in the past to improve at least the keyword + landing page relationship.

One of my favorites is the example below from Monday.com, which uses third-party inputs to demonstrate the benefits.

…aligns nicely with the landing page and allows the competitor’s keyword to be naturally incorporated into the landing page content:

As demonstrated by the preceding example, this is especially useful for comparison terms such as “x brand” vs. “y brand.” Don’t forget to include a strong CTA on the landing page to aid in conversion!

Now, go defend your brand

When your competition bids on your branded keywords, you must act quickly so that they do not continue to siphon quality prospects from your pipeline.

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