When competitors bid on your company name…

Posted by Laura Bergells

February 25, 2008

Congratulate yourself! When competitors bid on your company name or trademarked products as Adwords keywords, congratulate yourself! It usually means that you have a great product or company. Your competitors want to be associated with you, your company, your products, and services.

It also means that your competitors are running scared! Bidding on a competitor’s company name or trademarked products as Adwords keywords looks desperate. And it feels pathetic — if I’m searching for Company A, and I see that Company B is bidding: that very act speaks volumes about who they are as a company, what they think of their own products, and how they might treat me if I became a customer.

Yuch. “I know you’re interested in A, but I’m only going to show you B.”
Yowsa! “I don’t have much confidence that being honest and straightforward will work.”
Yikes! “If there’s anything we can do to trick you, we’ll do it!”

That cheap, tacky, icky feeling: that’s why I recommend that my clients never, ever buy the their competitors’ names as keywords. It makes them look second-rate.

Policy, schmolicy. Now, Google Adwords policy is that competitors can bid on your company name and trademarks as Adwords keywords. And you can buy their trademarks. It’s fair game. It’s all legal.

But it’s still a bad idea. After all, the same policy says that your competitors can’t use your company name or trademarks in their Adwords ads. This makes the ad quite weak. It is not likely to get much clickthrough.

But you still might be concerned about impressions – someone is looking for your site on Google, and there’s your competitor’s ad. You don’t want people thinking that you’re somehow associated with them, do you?

If you’re really concerned about competitors bidding on your trademarks as keywords, here’s an example to show what you can do to position yourself more positively — without engaging in dirty tricks or industry in-fighting:

Create a “Insert-Your-Company-Name-Here” campaign. Add your company name as the only keyword phrases in this campaign. (Remember to use exact match and phrase match for each keyword phrase!)

Write your Adwords ad to say something like:

Company A
Accept no imitations!
Visit Company A’s official site.
(CompanyA URL)

There are quite a few benefits to this approach:

Google bolds your company name in the Adwords Ad, garnering extra attention that will make your competitors all but invisible.
Positions your company & products positively: as something others want to imitate.
Subtly positions your Adwords competitors as “less reputable”.
Makes savvy searchers doubt the legitimacy of your competitors.

And sometimes, this approach even gets sleazy competitors who bid on your company name to back off — because it just makes them look so desperate!

How do you handle it when competitors bid on your company trademarks?