Nice article, but if applied to PPC then it has to be applied to
SEO & any sites which have commercial purposes.
ie You go into town to get something from Zavvi, last time you went there the premises next door were vacant. But this time Woolworths have opened up a store (next door) realising that cos Zavvi was a busy store, they could milk of some of the trade by being ideally located next door, plus the trade from their own brand. The sign above the Woolworths store says "Woolworths" not "Zavvi". ie relates to Zavvi not being in the copy of a sponsored ad, but simply taking advantage of location (ad placement)
All this is doing is encouraging competition.
Say you had an indexable page on your site listing 10 CD stores. When you examine your logs you see some traffic came in on a search string containing the brand "zavvi" but the user went of & bought from Woolworths.
Why is
SEO any different from PPC? (Apart from maybe easier to appear prominently & not forgetting the brand appears on the website page but NOT in the ppc ad)
Why are more stringent rules applied to PPC?
Has anyone actually polled a cross section of people (internet users not in the business) to ask if they know the difference between search results & sponsored listings are or what are those thingies in boxes appearing on the right that say some word called sponsored. If they said the word "adverts" do we think less or more people will click on them?
Brand monitoring tools are going to be a must for keeping an eye out on the competition, but with Google broadmatching with synoymns & the possible impending automatic matching. It will no longer be possible to confirm whether or not a affiliate or competitor is brand bidding.
Watch out for knee jerk T&C's saying you cannot "appear" rather than you cannot "bid"... as well as forcing negatives which is out of the control of advertisers cos there are uncontrollable inflluences of Google's matching algo. This is impratical as well because PPC'ers have 100's if not 1000's of campaigns. Put the boot on the other foot, would a merchant put 10,000 affiliate brands as negatives in their campaigns. Of course they wouldn't.
The power of controlling brand has been taken away in unison with embedded search. It's levelled the playing field & made a mockery of existing over restrictive T&C's which as we know are more lengthy than any much needed merchant copy.
One thing I hope comes out of this is that Brand Bidding Groups get well & truly burned as they potentially compete with competitors. "Or will panic only encourage more?"
And remember for any advertisers, lets take a portion of these advertisers known as affiliates. If they are not signed up to a "brand program", if desired they could bid on that brand to promote a "competitor merchant", the network would have no jurisdiction as the affiliate is not signed to the "brand program" unless the other "competitor merchant" did the decent thing & ask affiliates not to bid on competitor brands ... noting there are a lots of affiliate programs which currently say it is okay to bid on competitor brands & even more which don't say you cannot ... but again its hard to prove if someone is bidding or not.
More revenue for Google yes, but also more opportunities for other advertisers, one thing I will say is that because of broadmatch on synonyms (expanded match) & possible pending automatic matching, maintaining the trademark enforcement rules would have been impossible even for Google to manage or police, because merchants & networks could & do make false assumptions.
Some may say that the brand in the copy or display url with receive a higher ctr (click thru rate) or pay less per click. The competitor can simply counter & say it's about ROI, if they are getting a positive ROI, that is what is going to truly matter to them.
This could open up opportunites for merchants to release the use of their display url's (noting though there is a single display url policy) & increases the worth of generic & product related terms. Where leaching agencies who have had an easy ride on simple brand terms might have to work for their money where the spend didn't acheive as high an roi as before.
Interesting times ahead for sure.