On Wednesday Google announced separate trademark policy changes in that affect the UK, Ireland and Canada and the rest of Europe differently.

Reading about the changes on the web, I’m really surprised how many articles have got this one wrong. Mostly it seems to stem from an inability to distinguish that different policies have applied, and will apply, between UK and Ireland, and the rest of Europe. (Google has a helpful list of which countries it considers to be in Europe. To add to the confusion, some places on the list are in South America or the Antartic.)

Anyway, here’s a couple of charts that hopefully explain what’s changing.

Policy before September 14th 2010

Policy after September 14th 2010

The change happening to Europe (excluding UK and Ireland) happened in the UK in May 2008. Chaos was predicted, but failed to materialise. I wrote about it before the change and made some observations after it was implemented. I think the comments I made then still stand.

I’ve been using an internal EF tool that gives quick, top-level data on quality score for an account (e.g. 100 keywords with 10, 150 keywords with 9 etc). Something that struck me after looking at a few accounts: no keywords ever had a quality score of 8.

Weird, I thought, must be something wrong with the tool. So I downloaded some of the accounts into Adwords Editor for a closer look. Still no 8s. After a going over a good number of accounts, here’s what I found:

• Campaigns targeted to the UK and bought in GBP never have live keywords with a quality score of 8.
• The only 8s I found were paused – either at the keyword, adgroup or campaign level.
• One account that is targeted to the UK but bought in USD has 8s a plenty.
• Campaigns targeted anywhere else (continental Europe, US, you name it) have 8s.

I’ve asked a couple of friends who run campaigns to check too, and they see the same. So what’s going on here? Just a bug I suppose. But are we at any advantage or disadvantage? Are there 7s that should be 8s, or 9s that should be 8s? Let me know your thoughts!

Yes, that double negative in the title of this post is confusing, so let me explain.

One of the biggest challenges any Adwords advertiser faces is controlling how Google serves ads against queries. Google gives us four match types (broad, phrase, exact and negative) to control the ad serving. It’s broad match which is the most difficult and perhaps the least understood.

Imagine you’re bidding on the keywords cheap hotels and london hotels, both on broad match. Google will be triggering those keywords against all sorts of queries.

Say that cheap hotels isn’t working for you, so you decide to pause or delete it. Sensible thing to do, right? Wrong. All Google does in that case is trigger london hotels against all the queries that it used to trigger cheap hotels against. Nothing has changed.

To remedy this, follow these steps:

1. Regularly check the search query report in Adwords, and/or referrer reports from your web logs or tracking.
2. Take control of the serving. If broad match keywords are being triggered by lots of different queries, add those queries as exact matches.
3. Test your new exact matches. Keep the keywords that work, but do not delete the ones that don’t. Either bid them down to £0.01 or change them to negative match; the result is the same.
4. Repeat the above process.

I’ve seen this error time and time again when looking at clients’ campaigns for the first time. Google is making a fortune from it.

Here’s another one of those, “When did they do that?” posts. Looks like Google have made a great improvement to the My Change History tool.

You can now filter exactly which campaigns and adgroups you want the tool to look at:

This is great if you want to only look at a particular part of a big account. There was a feature on smaller accounts that did something similar, only with drop down boxes instead of a searchable text field. The catch with this was that it didn’t appear on large accounts, where it was really needed.

How long have Google been doing this?

The eagle-eyed search experts here in Efficient Frontier's London nerve centre alerted me to an update on Google's Search Sponsored Links feature. 

A link from the main SERPs underneath the right hand column allows you to browse just the ads for a particular search term. 

Previously, that link just sent you to a page like this but now it's quite different:

The most obvious thing is that now there are 12 ads on the page in a 3 across, 4 down grid. 

New Results Count

More interesting though is the results count.  In this case Google is showing 1-12 of a possible 877 ads.  If the number is to be believed, I think this is the first time you've been able to get a count of the competing advertisers for a given keyword.  Compare this to the green bars that are available in the Google Keyword Tool. 

This information would also be interesting for analysts, as some research suggests that the number of advertisers is falling.

Different Ranking Algorithm

The results are also ranked differently from those seen on the main SERPs.  Google's help page states that:

• Ads are ranked differently from competing AdWords ads.
• Clicks and impressions accrued by these ads aren't reported in your account.
• Advertisers are not charged for any clicks that result from these ads.
• Ads are not filtered for language preferences.
• Ads shown include those that have already met the daily budget for that day.

Why Has It Changed?

So in short, this new sponsored links search is a complete gallery of all ads that Google would consider showing for a particular keyword.  All very useful, but why has Google done this?  What does this add that the Ad Preview tool doesn't?  Any ideas are welcome!

My ugly mug featured in this week's NMA in a follow-up article by Will Cooper about trademark bidding on Google.  It would seem that the hysteria is finally dying down as common-sense returns to the situation.

There has been quite a few, how shall I say, ill-thought-out statements about this whole thing.

One agency claimed it would cost advertisers millions of pounds, an outlandish figure plucked from thin air. 

Others spoke about advertisers forming "gentleman's agreements" not to bid on each others' trademarks. Any commercial lawyer could have told you that if companies collaborate to try to fix their costs, they are in danger of breaking competition law.

And those companies that are threatening to sue Google appear to be tiliting at windmills. 

When Google announced this policy change, I posted that advertisers shouldn't panic.  Hopefully soon we'll all be able to accept the new status quo and get back to driving better ROI from our search campaigns (including even the non-trademarked keywords).

So the unthinkable is finally upon us and Uncle Google has stopped protecting our trademarks.  I have a few thoughts to share on this, based on what I've observed so far.

When did it actually change?
Google told us that the change should have happened on Monday 5th ('5/5', as the people at buy.at were calling it).  But perhaps Google realised that changing it on a public holiday was daft.  I searched high and low and saw no difference on Monday.

Expanded broad match is going crazy
Looking at many of the ads on trademarked terms, it struck me that Google's broad match was causing a lot of the chaos, rather than specific brand-bidding.  I mentioned this briefly on Patrick Altoft's blog.  He has lots of screenshots to illustrate this, which I don't have the time now to reproduce.

I also read on the Affiliates4U forum how long since forgotten adgroups are springing back into life now that the trademark ban is lifted.

It's going to take time for advertisers to get back control of their campaigns.

The Quality Score demon is coming
It can sometimes take 24/48 hours for Google to determine an ad's quality score, but this is coming very soon.  Advertisers who've managed to get some cheap trademarked clicks in the last day may suddenly find they have steep minimum bids to contend with by the end of the week. 

That's the main things for now, please add any of your own observations in the comments.

On Friday Google announced (via email) that it is going to remove advertising restrictions on trademarked keywords as of May 5th in the UK and Ireland.  Many advertisers are concerned that the consequences of this will hurt their AdWords campaigns, so I've put together some thoughts on what the likely result of this will be.

What Exactly is Changing?

At the moment, advertisers can register certain keywords with Google that they hold trademarks on, such as Harrods, Renault or easyJet. They can then request that Google prohibits other advertisers from bidding on these keywords without their express permission.

As of May 5th, this is going to change so that any advertiser will be able to bid on a trademarked keyword.  Trademarks will still be protected within the ad text though.

Why Are Google Making The Change?

In the announcement email, Google said:

A good proportion of users in the US and Canada have been clicking on competitor ads even when searching against trademarked terms, suggesting that they find the greater number of ads relevant and helpful when researching or making a purchase.

Believe that if you will.  Just because users clicked on competitor ads, it doesn't mean that it was a positive experience.  The claim above doesn't strike me as the most in-depth research.

The more likely reason, in my opinion, is that last month Yahoo won a court case in which it was sued for trademark infringement by showing multiple ads. That has cleared the way for Google to change its policy.

Isn't This Going To Wreck My Campaign?

I doubt it actually.  I know many advertisers underpin their AdWords campaigns with high returns on their brand keywords, which subsidises the rest and hopefully delivers an acceptable average ROI.  I'm sure if you pay 1p or 2p a click for brand keywords, you are worried about that cost increasing substantially.  I don't think that it will, provided you can agree with the following:

• You probably have a double-digit click through rate on your brand keywords.  This means any other advertiser will probably have a high minimum bid to appear on the keyword and will struggle to get close to your CTR.
• You control your affiliates closely and make it clear that you won't pay out any commissions that are earned via brand-bidding.

That said, come May 5th (a public holiday in the UK) I'm sure there will be a bit of chaos but I would expect that to die down within a couple of weeks.

What Happens In the US?

Have a look for yourself with Google's Ad Preview Tool.  I've done dozens of searches for all the US brand names I can think of and there's surprisingly little competitor activity. Here's a few examples:

• Geico (insurance): No ads
• Sears (retail): Just Sears themselves
• Expedia (travel): Two ads, Expedia and a competitor
• Jdate (dating): Just Jdate themselves
• Apple (luxury goods): Just Apple themselves

What's also interesting is that all of the above use the phrase 'official site' in the titles of their ads.  Something to try there if you're not already doing it.

So I'd conclude that although the policy change will require careful monitoring of your campaigns and your affilifates, there's no need to panic.  Expect a few bumps in the road, but I don't forsee a full blown crisis. Do leave a comment if you agree or disagree.

Here's a really horrid example of Google's Extended Broad Match that I caught last month.  Check out the first ad on the right-hand side for the new Apple laptop on a search for 'flights'.  Eurgh.