brand names and adwords on google

[azem]

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hiya,

What's generally most merchant's policy towards affiliates about allowing (or not allowing) them to use brand names in their keywords and ads on google?

after discussing this with the rest of our team we decided not to allow the brand names to be used as keywords and also the ads should not give the impression that they are ads from ourselves. Things like 'official site' etc are not allowed. Affiliates can for example say things like 'affiliate partner of...' etc.

This seems pretty fair to me but i was wondering what other merchants, and also affiliates think about this.

Azem William

[magicfootball]

I've found that most merchants do not allow affiliates to bid on thier own brand names - However you and they can bid on other comapny brand names. eBay is a perfect example.

[azem]

Sounds right to me.
We do allow the Affiliates to bid on artist names from our sites - which could be compared to other brands featured on our sites.

Azem William

[WillD]

It depends on a number of things.

1. How well know is your brand name?
2. Is your offer unique in your market place?
3. how tough is your competition
4. where are you placed in the natural results
5. How good is your own PPC?

E.g. Harrods is a well known brand name, and quite a unique word, they do appear top in the natural for this term. But if you search for Harrods Shirts, they are nowhere, in this case if I was Harrods I wouldn’t allow affiliates to bit on the term Harrods. On it’s own but would allow affiliates to bid on Harrods in conjunction with other words.

Will

[jess1]

Where possible I use a few trusted PPC guys to bid on the name, this is only when the merchant does not understand about PPC and where the human resources are low.

[Gavinio]

I think that responses are varied to this one - ultimately it's only worth trying to stop brand-name bidding if you can enforce it, and you can prevent competitors bidding on it too. Ultimately, who would you rather have in the top 10 on Google, yourself plus 5 of your affiliates and some others? Or yourself, plus 9 competing companies and other affiliates?

Can you really police it? You need to have some serious clout at google to be able to enforce brand bidding, see Freedom Finance on Google for how we do it!

[dawso77]

I agree with Jess1, its all about resources, if you have the time you can enforce it, if only all merchants knew how powerful search is. It feeds so much more than just ppc convesions.

As with Google, you dont need any clout, just a trademark and your sorted, check any major brand and see that no ones bidding....but then again there are variations